So I'm finally watching nuBSG

Random thought.

For the people of the 12 Colonies, their entire universe is contained in one (albeit very large and complex) solar system. Galactica can make it from Caprica to Ragnar, which seems to be basically the farthest point out, in three days at its top sublight speed. In the miniseries, Adama and Tigh consider an FTL jump within the system to be extremely dangerous.

Maybe Galactica and its raptors have FTL because it was necessary for conducting strikes against the Cylons during the war, but why are so many civilian ships outfitted with it? When would they use it?

For that matter, Tigh implies that it's been 22 years since Galactica had to execute an FTL jump. How is Cally familiar enough with them to say "I hate this part"?

It wasn't important to the series so they never really explained it, but their science advisor did put together a setup that matches the on-screen references that was made official in the backstory for the series Caprica.

https://atlasoficeandfireblog.wordp...graphy-battlestar-galacticas-twelve-colonies/

Basically the twelve colonies are part of a four star system, which consists of two binary pairs orbiting each other. FTL jumps would be needed to get across the larger distances while many other ships never strayed outside the orbit of their home star so didn't need FTL. With Galactica being so outdated it was performing duties more akin to coast guard meaning it never needed to travel the larger distances. While it had been many years since Galactica itself jumped, we see from the show that it's a common enough feature so presumably she had either experienced it on a civilian vessel or on a Raptor or other Battlestar as part of her training.

Because she served on another ship before Galáctica?

Just for fun... is the original BSG thread still here?

I’m not sure how long old threads are archived.

Maybe someone could necro it back to life or link to it.

Curious to read some of the old responses and theories.

It would also be a fun look back at Wordforge 2004.

Threads aren’t archived. But Wordforge had some kind of reset or colossal data loss or something at some point and so all threads before that date are gone. I think that it was in 2004 or 2005 but I might be mistaken. So long ago that details are fuzzy.

It also looks like the Wayback Machine didn't go deep enough on Wordforge to grab anything other than index pages, so whatever threads there were when the remake first started up, are lost. I did find a bunch of others ... I'll link them later (leaving out the one-post Baba threads, and also the rift in the space-time continuum that occurred when Baba's Tricia Helfer obsession and Baba's lesbian obsession collided).

She stopped into my after hours a few years back, around the time they were shooting "Ascension"... I said something along the lines of "you look a LOT like..." and got that look that celebrities give you where they're happy to be seen, but not pointed out.

You folks are about to talk me into doing a rewatch again soon. It's been a few years since I last did one, which was a partial rewatch because I didn't go all the way to the end. I've only seen the last season once, but during the show's original run, I watched the previous seasons a few times to refresh my memory before a new season would begin.

While not exactly canonical I always thought this map was interesting. It does have some input from the show's creators.

Because of this thread I put on Kobol's Last Gleaming Pt 2 the other night and watched it (they have BSG on Amazon Prime) - forgot how fucking great it was. Might have to do a full series watch again

seems to match up with the game...

Is that Deadlock?

yup
not the greatest game-even without grinding you reach an ideal fleet setup fairly quickly and then it's jsut narrative and meh AI. I'm not much for multi, but this could at least be like quick chess or something.

otoh, the skeleton of a story and allusions to a richer universe are intriguing. It doesn't try to pre canon anything so much as build off of what was established. Sort of in that Sharpe's Rifles series-it's the event's happening on the other side of the hill.

There's a lot of BSG threads (although nothing pre-2005 unfortunately). I recommend searching for terms like Caprica and Kobol and displaying results as threads to get them and less of other threads that just happen to mention Galactica. We even had a bunch of threads just for individual episodes.

I'm going through some of the old threads. It's interesting to see people correctly predict various plot points before they happen.

In this one --
Final 2 BSG Episodes for Season 3. MAJOR SPOILERS
https://wordforge.net/index.php?threads/final-2-bsg-episodes-for-season-3-major-spoilers.45721/
-- @matthunter nails the timeline of how the Final Five fit in with the other humanoid Cylons.

In this --
BSG 3.5
https://wordforge.net/index.php?threads/bsg-3-5.43701/
-- @Spider predicts Tigh as the member of the Final Five who D'Anna recognizes.

Also, I didn't realize how many people were annoyed by Starbuck.

yeah... looking back she is pretty marysue... but at the same time she's eventually also kind of a metatron/extra(?)human.

I don't really see her as a Mary Sue. She's a really good pilot, fighter and strategic thinker, but she's a hot mess at everything else.

I never quite understood what the Colonial military was doing before the Cylon invasion. Supposedly all the Colonies were ruled by one government? But if the military was mostly there to suppress uprising and secessions, wouldn't we get very different propaganda from the one we see in the show? And if it's mostly there to defend against the Cylons, what sense does it make to go back to networked ships because you assume the Cylon threat is gone forever? Moreover, many of the soldiers seem to be veterans, even those two young to have fought the Cylons the first time around -- so what combat did they see?

The one-post Baba threads are essential reading in Wordforge's BSG history, even if the quality isn't as good (kind of like the Black Market episode).

I figure it was just your typical training regimen, thinking that some day the enemy might return so you have to keep your guard up. As far as the networking thing goes, people tend to get a little lax as time wears on, but Adama was pretty strict about how his ship would not allow those systems aboard. It's also possible they were there to "keep the peace" so to speak among the colonies, since they only united together after the first war and it was tenuous at best.

I don't really think of these as plot holes, unlike most of Star Trek. It's just several of those things that you need to let happen for the narrative to proceed.

One possibility -- maybe the Colonies don't object to the military playing a role in civilian law enforcement. Galactica could have spent time patrolling for smugglers, pirates, etc., on top of which relations between colonies don't seem to be all that great -- there could be periodic mini-rebellions, especially if Baltar and Cally are right about Caprica basically running everything.

It's interesting to try to figure out the Colonies' government structure and just how tight a union it is. The anti-Sagittaron feelings that seem to be common suggest a much looser union than the U.S., and maybe something a lot closer to the E.U. -- states that were until recently completely sovereign and still have large cultural differences. (I'm ignoring the fact that they all speak the same language, since that's just a matter of storytelling convenience.) But the amount of power the president has, such as being able to unilaterally outlaw abortion, suggests a system with very few devolved powers, something even more centralized than the U.S. today.

Maybe unification just happened really quickly, with political centralization outpacing cultural integration. That makes sense given that the federation was formed because of the Cylon war. It's a union born of necessity, and a lot of people aren't very happy about it. (Hence the unrest for the military to be involved in stopping.)

Good points. They do actually have different languages, they just also have one almost everyone knows, so very much like Europe. I think the President outlawing abortion was not supposed to be among her usual powers, and that was part of the conflict.

I do keep ending up assuming the military was to quench uprisings among the Colonies. Only that seems to be completely at odds with their attitude and propaganda.

I think the military presence was a natural result of so many years of war with the Cylons. I think it was a 10-15 year war that obviously had a lasting cultural effect. 40-something years later, we see a bloated, increasingly irrelevant military presence that isn't too dissimilar from our own history.

Look at the US: it ramped up industry for WWII, and then suddenly had a military beast on it's hands. And the US was only in WWII for a fraction of the Cylon War. We've seen that it's much harder to make that mindset go away than to create it, even after 70 years.

I ordered the Blu-Ray, and while waiting for it to arrive, I've been watching some of the original episodes on NBC's website.

1) By modern standards it's pretty cheesy and dumb, but by late '70s televised sci-fi standards, I bet that shit was fucking Shakespeare.

2) When I first read about the Star Wars lawsuit, I assumed it was just George Lucas being a dick -- but now that I've seen a couple of episodes, the attempt to riff on the Star Wars aesthetic is pretty blatant. Especially in the battle scenes when you're watching a bunch of vipers that look suspiciously like X-wings in profile and the horns start playing ...

3) Does anyone else think the original Cylons look a little ridiculous? They're kind of ... pear-shaped. All jowly and pot-bellied. The Chief Wiggums of robotic galactic menaces. The stormtroopers pulled it off way better.

4) I cannot tell Apollo and Starbuck apart. At all. And Athena and Serina look similar enough that even seeing them with their respective squeezes doesn't help, unless Boxey is around or somebody is calling them by name.

5) Fuck that stupid little robot dog. In the ear.

Here's a question (jumping back to the reimagined series) ... is there any rank or hierarchy within the Cylon society, aside from the centurions being subservient to the humanoid models?

The Ones' influence seems to come from manipulating the others and keeping information from them, rather than any formal authority. There are a few times when one Cylon acts like an authority figure (a Three telling others that information is on a need-to-know basis, the Natalie Faust Six seeming to lead the rebel faction) but we never see anything that explicitly confirms a hierarchy.

At the end of the miniseries, an Eight says "Don't worry, we'll find them" and a Six says "By your command," but since the Eight didn't actually give a command, it almost has the feeling of a ritual response (sort of a Cylon equivalent to "so say we all"). Out-of-universe, I assume the writers just wanted to get that TOS catchphrase in.

If you're doing the full deep dive I hope you're going to get through 1980.

I don't know if there's any special significance behind the bagpipey music that plays whenever there's a touching moment between Adama and Apollo, but I like it.

Random thought that just occurred to me: Granted, we don't know who was traveling on the various civilian ships, but is Apollo the only adult in the entire human race who still has a living parent?

There was at least Sagittaron parent and adult child in the fleet, until the son was murdered at the age of 19 in The Woman King.

Oh, right -- I forgot about them.

Although that's in Season 3, so if their society has the same age of majority as ours, it could still have been true in the beginning.

I think "The Hand of God" is one of my favorite early episodes. Good Adama/Apollo dynamic, some strong character development for Starbuck, great pacing throughout.