it's not clear yet whether Galactica has bow mounted railguns similar to those we've seen in action on Pegasus. They do share turrent-mounted kinetic energy weapons, Galactica has 24, mounted dorsally and ventrally, with secondary point-defence batteries arranged mostly along the flight-pods; on Pegasus, they are/were mostly concentrated along the side of the ship, within the gap created by the upper and lower halves of the hull, including the flight pods. Four are mounted on the underside of the upper hull on the ship's bow, below which sit the four non-turreted large railguns, the main forward batteries. Two more turrets are mounted on the front and back of each flight pod. The Mercury class's secondary guns are distributed all over the ship and do not clearly emerge from the hull like Galactica's.

I took a good look at close-ups of Galactica's bow and I can't see anything that stands out as dedicated forward batteries; but generally speaking, Galactica's main turrets have performed well in an anti-capship role as well as providing flak cover. I'm assuming that since the design of Pegasus was intended to more closely emulate the Battlestars of TOS, it was decided to copy the idea of forward batteries in order to distinguish the Mercury-class as a significant improvement over Galactica-type Battlestars.

Basestars appear to be quite vulnerable to Colonial KEWs, Galactica and Pegasus' guns have fairly ripped them apart, Basestars having only missile weaponry and Raiders (although an awful lot of both) and it would appear that raiders operate not only in an offensive role but also as a point-defence solution; hence why almost every time the Colonials have gone toe-to-toe against Basestars, they've drawn the Raiders off, leaving only the missiles to deal with, which Battlestars seem able to stand an extreme amount of punishment from. Adama was quite prepared more than once to take on two Basestars under such conditions and was confident of his ships capacity to deal with two, but three or four were too much. Pegasus and Galactica combined were more than capable of destroying two without much difficulty.

For shame, Taw! You! Typing "turrent"!. tsk tsk tsk... sand must be getting to you.

You make an excellent point about it now being 'batteredstar Galactica", though I'd think they would be trying to repair the hull plating to give Galactica some better armor. Now that she's fully staffed again, Galactica should be stronger than ever. After the Battle of Exodus, they presumably inherited the Pegasus air wing, and so should have many more Vipers (esp Mark VII's) to use.

I took a cruise to the Battlestar Wikipedia to get some more information, and watched some cuts from the miniseries on YouTube to get a better idea of the landing /launching process. Apparently, fighters land in the pods, then take elevators down to the hangar deck. From there, they sit in their cubbyholes (which are all immediately behind the launch tubes). Not sure quite yet how they get in the tubes, but in one of the miniseries battles, they show Viper launches in great detail, and there are catapults used. These catapults were strangely absent during the secret executions.

Shouldn't Galactica be out of ammo by now? Those flak guns burn an enormous amount of ammo (think of surrounding a ship 4x the size of a Nimitz with a continuous sphere of shrapnel...). I haven't seen them resupply since Ragnar (unless they were getting things from the Pegasus' "automated production facilities"...

And I still demand to see retracted flight pods before jumping!

I was typing turret but thinking torrent, and thus came up with a new word!

this ammunition malarkey has always bothered me. Galactica afaik had no means of making it's own ammunition; Pegasus did, but Pegasus is gone now. We do know that civilian labourers were used in at least part of the ammunition manufacturing process (Epiphanies) so presumably there is some sort of manufacturing capacity within the Fleet?

I noticed the lack of mag-cats in the launch tubes in Collaborators, and I watched the Viper launches in the mini-series again to check, and yep, they're clearly visible (bright purple things that seem to be counter-weighted) And Chief Tryol conspicuously gets his crew to pull Starbuck's MkII out of the tubes then put it back in. And with no airlock, shouldn't the hangar-deck decompress rapidly when the Viper launch tube doors open to space?

Galactica got two full squadrons of MkVIIs from the Pegasus production line as a result of the mining operations in the Skar episode. Although quite where all the Pegasus Vipers are going to go, I dunno, you'll remember that in the Pegasus episode, when Apollo and Kat intercepted Pegasus, she had scores of them around her. Presumably some have been lost through attrition but Pegasus could make good her losses, so Galactica must be stuffed with Vipers now. Ah well, it should stop the Chief moaning about the lack of spares anyway (it also means that the Galactica AG shouldn't need to fly MkIIs anymore, but you know they will!)

For one episode, the pod retraction is a critical element, can't jump without retracting the pods. And it's never been mentioned since, not once. These continuity errors are really annoying at times.

A quick check of the battlestar wiki (www.battlestarwiki.com) shows that the turrets are indeed Galactica's primary weapons. Also, the starboard flight pod is still clearly out of service during "Exodus" (looking closely you can still see the large window over the end". Recall also that this pod was still sealed last season when Galactica was boarded by the Cylons in the heavy Raider. It is now allegedly being used to house refugees.

As far as airlocks for the launch tubes go, Taw, they are there. Recall that during the executions, the Esquilax (erm, sorry, kangaroo) Court left, then shut the door behind them before opening the outer hatch. That is to say, there is a hatch between the tube and the hangar.

Also, the hangar deck is much larger than we ever see.... even though we may see a half dozen ships at best, I think one of the 'behind the scenes' specials awhile back showed the entire CG rendered hangar.... stretched on forever. After all, those pods are at least half the length of the ship.

you're quite right, there was indeed an inner door. how remiss of me!

you'd think they'd get that starboard pod fixed at some point, theyve had nearly 2 years in space. lazy s*ds.

I've never seen any of the behind the scenes specials!

if you think about it, with galactica floating in space for two years, how is it that when air is lost via the massive airlocks in the hangar that they aren't all suffering from decompression. This is puzzling.

They have big air-making machines and CO2 scrubbers all over the ship. You often see them in corridor shots.

edit - I just realised something! that window over the starboard pod was smashed to pieces by the Cylon Heavy Raider that crashed into it way back in S2. So they cna fix the broken glass but can't turn the pod back into a servicable flight deck? (Actually, iirc in TOS you only ever saw the port pod being used, and usually only portside shots as well.)

Edited by - Tawakalna on 10/30/2006 2:03:42 PM

I can't image that they'd be packing along spare glass that just happened to fit the opening on the starboard flight pod of a fifty year old battlestar.

Still, sealed as it may be, it must be active, or at least useable. After all, when the ship was being museumed, they got a squadron of Mk II vipers to display. They made these ships serviceable and flew them in combat. Now, though they may operate from the starboard pod, they were originally stored in the port pod, and since you can't move them from side to side through the ship, those vipers must have been launched from the port side and flown to the starboard...

Not that much of this matters, as Galactica always seems to enter battle with the threat axis being to starboard anyways... nice one, directors.



Sadly I only ever saw half of the miniseries at best, and now there's no way to do that without paying the massively inflated price on iTunes to get the downloads in a useless proprietary format. Are they out on DVD?

Also, from TOS, what happened to Apollo's kid and the robotic dog, Muffet?

Edited by - J Dawg on 10/30/2006 3:57:42 PM

I'm sure you can find ways to get round that particular problem, J Dawg

As regards Apollo's kid, well, firstly, he wasn't Apollo's kid - as such. Apollo fell in love with a woman called Serina (Dr Quiin Medicine Woman) who'd been rescued from the Cylon attack on Caprica, who had a son called Boxey. Boxey had had to leave behind his dog-like pet called a daggit (I think the Cylons killed it.) Apollo had the Galactica tech, Dr Wilker build a robot daggit which Boxey with oustanding originality named Muffet II (mostly just Muffet.). Eventually Apollo and Serina got married making Boxey now Apollo's stepson, and Serina joined Galactica's Viper Squadron against Apollo's wishes, and quite predictably died, mortally wounded by Cylons (iirc) in an ambush on Kobol in the episode "Lost Planet of the Gods" - so Apollo raised him as his own.

jump forward a couple of decades and Galactica eventually finds Earth in the utterly dire and forgettable sequel, Galactica '80. Warning! It's really bad and you aren't missing anything if you don't watch it, but it did introduce humanoid Cylons, advanced Raiders, and tie up some loose ends of TOS including what happened to Starbuck. However, it had invisible flying motorbikes, cycle gangs, boy scouts with incredibly unrealistic powers, an annoying child genius called Dr Zee, Nazis, flying saucers, impoverished Mexican farmers, magic growing plants, very dodgy sets, endless inapproriate stock footage, and some of the worst screenplays ever seen in a tv series, so bad they made Macguyver look professional. Anyhoo, Boxey, now called Troy, all grown up is now Galactica's lead pilot, complete with Starbuckesque sidekick Dillon, and together they essentially fill exactly the same roles as their predecessors. Adama's still in command but Boomer is now XO. It didn't start off too badly but rapidly degenerated into low-budget Saturday afternoon fare for under 10s, with only one truly good episode, featuring Starbuck's fate in an Enemy Mine scenario marooned on a desolate planet with only a Cylon for company.

No daggits, robotic or otherwise, were ever seen in Galactica '80 although Troy/Boxey does mention them a couple of times upon encountering terrestrial dogs.

The miniseries did re-introduce the character of Boxey, he was the kid Sharon rescued off Caprica when she left Helo behind, his father was the Colonial officer who was killed at Armistice Station in the opening scenes. However the writers chose not to pursue the character any further, a wise decsion imo because Boxey was one of the most annoying things about TOS and was forever getting lost/stuck/captured/falling out of the Landram, along with his silly daggit. In one episode Boxey and Muffet actually saved Galactica and I still hang my head in despair at the memory. Why do TV execs always assume that kids want to see other kids? BG appealed to me cos of battles and spaceships and heroics and all that Count Iblis and War of the Gods stuff, not cos of a dumb kid and his robot dog. Boxey is on a par of annoyance with that dratted Weasley Crusher off ST:TNG.

Taw Battlestar trivia time - the actor who played child Boxey, Noah Hathaway, was also the hero Atreyu in The Never Ending Story. OK that's not much in the way of trivia, everyone knows that, but did you know that the actor who played grown-up Boxey, Kent Mccord, also played Crichton's dad in Farscape? and that his sidekick, Dillon, was played by Barry van Dyke, son of Dick van Dyke of "gor' blimey Mary Poppins" fame? And that James Patrick Stuart (not that THAT Patrick Stewart!) who played the second ever so annoyong Dr Zee, has been in Babylon 5 and ocassionally pops in CSI? (I don't watch that though so I'm not sure which one he is) The actor who first played Dr Zee, Robbie Rist, does voice-acting for anime and for games, and was the voice of Michelangelo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.



Edited by - Tawakalna on 11/1/2006 1:40:42 AM

New episode is now only 14 hours away! In the commercials I've seen hints at what is to come, and I'm a bit disappointed (not in the quality, but where the story is going)...

It looks like the fleet it going to contact Baltar at some point now... I thought they'd be rid of that dratted fellow.

The cylons want Earth to be their new home.

Baltar questions his cyloninity. Will we find out that Baltar is "Number 1"? I've got a hunch he is... we've only seen about half the models so far.


And finally, is there some sort of ranking structure for Cylons? That is, are all the 'skinned' models equal in authority, or do the Fives have more power than the sixes etc... Threes seem to always be running things.

there seems to be a descending order of rank - the earlier the number, the higher rank the model seems to have. I don't think Balthar is No 1 or has any other association with the Cylons than we've seen so far, because amongst themselves the Cylons always refer to him as human, and he was a public figure in the Colonies long before the Cylon infiltration began (about 2 years prior to the fall of the Colonies) The episode "Downloaded" I think pretty much put paid to any rational speculation of Balthar being a Cylon. However, myself I think it's pretty much going in the direction of him being an "agent" of God, or at least mysterious forces beyond his understanding or perception that his virtual 6 seems to be a representative of (and conversely, Caprica's virtual Balthar may well be an emisssary of opposing pro-human "powers"

myself I want to see Apollo have something to do other than paperwork and gym class, and for the series to explore why the Cylons have this fanatic monotheistic faith in a God when they are artificial constructs originally invented as labour by humans, which being logical machines they would surely recognise? speculation:- was it the Cylon "God" that made them rebel in the first place? and as the first Cylon War was 40 years previously, might said "God" still be around, on the Cylon homeworld maybe?



Edited by - Tawakalna on 11/3/2006 10:51:30 AM

I have never seen the new BSG, and was wondering if they have space combat like they did in the original BSG? Or is there more?

Is it like a soap opera, or more action?

Reason I'm asking is because if its good as in not a space soap opera like the new Star Treks, and there is a lot of space fighting action I will buy the first 2 seasons on DVD to see what I missed. But if it isn't very good I don't want to waste $120 on DVD's.

"It doesn’t matter what universe you’re from. That’s got to hurt!"

it's very very different from the original BSG, much darker and with some very adult themes. SFX are out of this world, but the human tech is not too dissimilar from today's, as in the human society & politics. It has very strong undercurrents that reflect current events, such as religious fanaticism v. pluralism and moral relativism, collective trauma in the face of overwhelming events, terrorism, occupation by enemy forces purporting to be "friends" - it is indeed a very thought-provoking mirror to our own world.

Galactica is also set apart from other sf shows in that it uses hand held cameras to produce a documentary "feel" and to accurately portray the cramped interiors of overcrowded spaceships - al lot of the time you feel you're looking at the interior of a submarine, and it does have that "Das Boot" dinginess and claustrophobia.

if you like your sf hard, dark, disturbing and full of visceral action (because the battles are superb and the music score is haunting and evocative) the the new BSG shouldn't be missed. It is definitely not a kid's show though, and I won't let my 12 yr old watch it - until I've watched it first and checked it out for inappropriate content.

FD hates it though

You raise some points about Baltar being human, though I'm not entirely sure. You will recall, however, than in TOS, the Cylons were controlled by a human. So, perhaps, though he may not explicitly be a Cylon, I think that there is a deeper relationship between them that will be shown up soon.

Note the plurals. The Cylons constantly talk about one diety, while the colonials refer to several. Keep in mind, we have now two conflicting religions.