Battlestar Galactica | Crunching the Numbers 

It was Lt. Gaeta.

That’s what’s great with the BSG series: beneath the very exciting sci-fi universe, there are always very relatable characters and plotlines.

Like we used to say in the Air Force, it’s the little things that will blow you up☝🏾

It's what makes it real. RDM served, and it shows.

I hate the fact that they didn't consult an IT person for this... or explain how the hell the colons bridged the air gap... like why weren't any transmitters and recievers physically disconnected? And if they were how did the colons get into the networks?

Absolutely.

He is in the hospital here in Vancouver and it’s not looking like he will get out.

@@matthewthorpe9641 It's one sad story but that's the way 2020 has been going. I saw there is a GoFund me or some other similar fund created for him. I hope he survives.

I do agree 100%

Yah. And Kate Vernon as his wife, Ellen... every time they were on screen together, it hurt how believable their actions and emotional reactions were. You just can't properly show the human element alone, but they had it, and they showed it, and it was terrible and it was grand.

Colonel Tigh knew Lt Gaeta from previous experience & had no reason to trust Baltar who was a media sensation.

He only stopped valuing him when he started working for the cylons

Yeah.. i renember back when this aired.. when in laters eps it becames evident that there was a Cylon infiltration in Galactica systems some people said how it was posible if Galactica had broken the network and when going back to this ep sure enought the final firewall was indeed breached for a second and its too subtle that you need to look for it to notice..

What systems did the infiltration affected? I can't seem to recall that episode.

I never noticed that detail until you brought it up. Nice.

@@YurkerYT All systems were flashing red on the screen.

@@YurkerYT Valley of Darkness and whichever one they built the Blackbird in

Yeah, something about him threatening to theatrically have Adama suffer a fatal heart attack on-screen the instant any aliens appear in the show.

Guess they didn't get awfully lucky afterall…

Snapper314 Yep! I always thought they missed detecting it, but this is even better. There is a reason why we connect and automate complex procedures in real life. It is simply too much to ask of people to keep track of everything in the middle of a crisis situation.

I so didnt notice that until now

It was breached but he cut the network before anything could happen. Otherwise Galactica could have lost power or life support. Shows just how close they could have come

@@SantomPh It wasn't enough. In the next couple of episodes it becomes clear that the Cylon virus has propagated through the core systems and begins trying to subvert the computer systems and kill everyone. It almost succeeded too.

too much drama for me, but much better then Star Trek Discovery and Star Trek Picard

Even Dirk Benedict got along with her.

Nice catch

Good call. I missed that. Did you notice in the episode "Bllod on the Scales" how the FTL drive looks like a cross between an old steam ship piston drive and a magnetic Casmir Engine? As if you were trying to design something that could create enough negative energy for, oh, I don't know, opening a wormhole...

Lol But the “star pattern” isn’t different because Galactica jumped to a new location. The “star pattern” looks different because the camera angle changed. In fact, when they filmed this scene, Galactica didn’t move at all - they just shut off the camera, moved the camera to a new angle, and then turned the camera back on. Much cheaper to film it that way. Teehee

What they missed though is during the jump, Gaeta and Dualla apparently switch places. Before the jump, Dee is at the FTL console while Gaeta is sitting looking at the DRADIS screen. After the jump, Gaeta was now standing at the FTL console,... What the frak?

Without spice too.

Yes, I heard that they did that to give it more of a true-to-life military feel, rather than the usual sci-fi cheese laser guns.

What makes it work is they still keep the color coding from the original series (Colonial weapons fire is red, Cylon weapons fire is white) so there's a bit of a continuity nod mixed in with the realism.

For me that was the most annoying thing. That meant the combat became completely unrealistic. They could fly and turn fast, which would make it almost impossible to hit with a ballistic projectile. It would be like a WW2 bombing raid, 2000 bombs with just a couple hitting the target. Then instead of using railguns, which would cause massive damage and would be hard to avoid, they used nukes which are almost completely useless in space.

@@DavidPruitt Technically missles are the better long range weaponry, since they can correct course to compensate for evasion. Railguns are just guns with higher projectile velocity, but like in Expanse, they are used for close quarters combat, as on the great ranges the projectile could be detected and avoided. On another hand, the battles feel extremely short range. In reality spaceships would probably try to engage with missles over huge distances, but here Cylons and Battlestars do come extremely near each other. Certainly way closer than a missle range should allow. On the other hand, the ships in BSG seem to be extremely bulky, So maybe that is the justification for projectile weapons - the ships can't dodge due to inertia. In real world we would probably forgo the size in favour of smaller ships that could dodge. Unless the FTL capacity required this massive size.

@@DavidPruitt Why is a nuke useless in space?

"All Vipers, weapons free! Open ranks...and engage!"

It's why they're affectionately referred to as "Toaster Racks" in their design commentary.

@@Mobius_118 that’s also a nickname in the lore aswell

Same.

He's in better shape now. Still has a lot of recovery to do.

"she broke her back, she'll never jump again" still get a not in my stomach just thinking this one line

Yeah. After I spent the money and got the series on DVD

@@the_weed_in_your_garden9319 BluRay here.

I'm cool with that.

Well, the entire show is on Peacock for free

It's available for download via the BBC.

The Expanse came close, but never surpassed BSG.

@@gutspillage I would say that when Rocinante was assaulting the Protogen station along with Fred Johnson's OPA troops was also extremely tense.

@@SternwallJerkson MCRN donnager man...

@@VaniFoxOfficial Well, I for one, firstly would have done away with the narration. Secondly I don't think they should have "decided" to go full Ludite. Instead I would have just had the fleet disappear with no explanation, stranding the survivors on Earth with few tools to colonize the new world. But perhaps the biggest change I would have made for a show that was originally panned for being a Star Wars rip off, would be to NOT end the series with the revelation that it all happened "a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away".

@@rsrt6910 it didn't happen in a galaxy far far away though? It happened in the exaft galaxy we're in right now…

They were stupid for sending humanity to the stone age when a bipolar ai force like the cylons still exist. Let's become vulnerable and forget our history. Good plan.

Less needed when you have hull armour that can take a direct thermonuclear strike.

@@audience2 and yet a Silon ship can just crash through....

@@finscreenname mass x speed, go fast enough a marble can penetrate tank armor

@@finscreennameI think if you watch it crashed through the glass open end of the flight pod that was part of the museum it was in the process of becoming at the start of the war.

@@linusa2996 So a ship can go faster than a missile? X to soubt

I hear you brother

The best,...? It's entertaining, but far from being the best.

I have often thought about this as well. Only need to keep the system with Wifi essentially separate. The rest of the systems should be fined networked internally if their is no remote access. The only reason I could think of and is probably why they didn't network computers, is intruders on the ship. Rare circumstance, but if Cylons board and got to one terminal, the ship was essentially there's. I recall reading or hearing this was a tactic in the first Cylon war, board the ship, get to a computer, access the O2 and vent the ship. In this case, just not linking in the coms could have saved the extra firewall's but probably delayed the calculations by a few minutes. Risk vs reward I guess.

I was under the impression the Cylons were not relying solely upon communications systems to disable the Colonial forces. Maybe I'm wrong but it always seemed like they had multiple attack vectors and weaknesses plotted. I don't need to necessarily find an official antenna but any interface I can interact with will do and any vulnerability in the comms system would be quickly overcome. Baltar gave them access to everything and you just need to find a computer terminal that can function as an antenna, regardless of whether it was designed that way. The same sort of speculative backdoor China was accused of by Bloomberg using hardware chips loaded with malware.

Any sufficiently long cable is an antenna.

@@FeepingCreature fiber optics...

He would have been had he not taken the time to literally call out the calculations were done, instead of breaking the network and calling out at the same time at least.

Evidently there wasn't time to take advantage of the breach...

These clips demonstrate how well it stands up.

The Expanse is the next best thing.

I think that's part of the point. They are all humans doing their best. Many times they make mistakes and fail, but in the end they're more or less okay.

@@blusafe1 yeah, he didn't exactly have a lot of time to set it up. And they were very anti-computer/automation on that ship, because of the previous war with the Cylons. And I like to think he needed the order, because he was too focused on his success.

Also: probably LAST good one for many years more....

Certainly the best sci-fi series of the last 30 years.

I would agree that it's probably the best sci-fi series. In terms of overall, it would have to contend with The Sopranos, which in my book is a hard fight to win.

And their phones. Even on the more modern Pegasus.

Yeah it was boomer, she was a cylon sleeper agent

Exactly

Well, they had infiltrated the whole defense network before the first strike(through Baltar). So there was no hacking needed, just . send the command, all ships disabled.

Humans created the Cylons. It's the first thing stated on the show. What was covered later on (in "Caprica") was the fact that enlightened Cylons gained sentience and a sense of independence through the dead daughter of the man who created them in the first place. What really fubared the whole situation was monotheistic humans who thought the grass was greener when they brought religion into the Cylon mindset - which literally drove them insane. All they needed after that was the ability to control the defence networks, which was enabled by Gaius Baltar and Caprica Six who between them built a new defence network using a reprogrammed MCP processor - of the same type used as the Cylons' individual central processing units. You know the difference between a physical kill switch and a digital one? There isn't one. With either one you can cripple a communications network with a radio signal to drop a guillotine on a strap of data cables or randomly encrypt a root folder.

Glass section of the flight pod that was being converted to a museum, not the armour.

its a microsoft download timer

They did fall to the virus if you watch carefully you see the breech but to be honest it's easy to miss.

Not enough spare hands. At GQ, everyone is supposed to be doing their jobs. The Damage Control crews are the only ones who are really sitting around waiting for the time to do their job.

Star trek should be like Star Trek. Naive and optimistic, not gritty grim dark sci-fi fueled by violence and despair that a million franchises have done better.

because like klutzman said himself: "Star Trek is a (propaganda) Platform" .the Corporate Puritans just hijacked the name.

No it's not. It's just the edgy bois of today want stuff to be daaaaaaaaaark. Light hearted doesn't sell. That's why the second Star Wars trilogy had to be a dark emo fest. Hell even effing Batman is now dark and grandiose. Anyway. That's why Star Trek is now full of injustice, violence, people swearing and so on. The "humanity that made it" that is at the core of Star Trek soul just wouldn't sell today.

One you eat, one you fight, one you love. GO.

Just the right amount. I'm glad the show didn't needlessly drag on forever.

@@VaniFoxOfficial True. But we need more of the same...

@@heldermartins8785 the story was finished there was no need for anymore after season 4, that is the best writing.

@@john_molden Yeah, u might be right. But I'm a sucker for anything Galactica related. As a matter of fact, anything scifi related. I appreciate ur input but, we need more of this. :)

With respect, BSG hit its stride perfectly during Season 2 up until the end of the New Caprica arc. After that, it was literally a case of the writers trying not to write themselves in a corner, but keep the show going, as they were running out of ideas. I remember something about a writer's strike around the time The Fleet reached the 13th Tribe's Earth, and found the planet nuked itself. If things went poorly IRL, *That* would have been the end of the show then and there. Luckily things turned out alright, and although many *many* disagree with Galactica and friends finding our Earth in pre-recorded history times and being our ancestors to modern Us, I'd take that ending any day and a solid 4 seasons over anything else.

3 dimensional space and all.

@@platiuscyndar9017 That's what the Carom is for, no? Bearing relates to azimuth and Carom to elevation. You can point to any place in a 3D environment with these 2 planes (together with distance when necessary). I still don't see how you can have an azimuth greater than 360°.

@@ArcherAC3 good point. That said, they might not have the same units as we do…

@@ArcherAC3 I agree. 0 to 359 for X, 0 to 180 for Y. Z is arbitrary since there is no "up" or "down" in space. Either is relative to the plane of any given star system but doesn't mean much in open space.

@@michaelmorton5698 No, 0 to 359.9999... can determine any direction in a two dimensional plane, taking care of both X and Y. The question then lies in how to define "up", the problem being that navigational conventions and mathematical 3D geometric conventions contradict each other (e.g. navigational angles sweep clockwise-positive from the reference axis, mathematical ones anticlockwise). Given that Galactica has artificial gravity and thus a definite floor and ceiling, it's not hard to choose that direction for practical purposes, at least in terms of bearings relative to the reference frame of the ship. And the reference frame of the ship is what matters when you consider fire control and target tracking.

The faster you are going when you land, the harder it is to design wheels for. Centrifugal acceleration gets ridiculous pretty quick. It is proportional to velocity squared over the radius of your wheel. Add in impact force from landing as an additional problem. This is actually one of the design limitations on aircraft landing speeds (controllability/stalling and impact/weight are two other big ones). The Concord (and many other early supersonic aircraft) had an enormous amount of engineering put into its landing system and landing characteristics to create economically maintainable landing gear for passenger use. Most jets land between ~140 - 180 mph (185 - 300 kph). It is hard to imagine combat landing speeds for Colonial Vipers being less than 5 times that. With landing speeds five times faster, the centrifugal forces on the wheels would be 25 times higher. It quickly gets to the point where even nano-composite materials like carbon nanotubes would fail. So, skids would be a sensible, if high maintenance way to solve the problem.

They’re not actually supposed to land that hard. The normal procedure is for a pilot to completely arrest his momentum before landing vertically on the flight deck. This procedure is, however, ignored throughout the series because they often don’t have time to land properly.

@@ronin3381 I think it's only seen in the miniseries before the war starts

It went through glass not the armored belt

Yeah it crashes on the flight deck

@@supremeleaderstarscream7898 It was also the flight pod that had been turned into a museum, so there was literally no one in that section to notice that the Galactica had been boarded.

While nuclear weapons do have high energy release you have only ever witnessed the destruction capabilities on earth in atmosphere. Significant damage is caused usually by the shockwaves caused by atmosphere in a pressured environment. In space there is no air forcing the explosive force against the hull, vacuum is far easier for the energy to release too while the hull not only being so heavy fortified would also be significantly surface cool absorbing energy from the blast. If you look at films where an asteroid is heading to earth, they almost all have to drill down to plant the nuclear weapon under the surface rather than launching it direct from earth. That’s the reason why.

@@backupplan6058 Thanks, that is something I didn't consider.

I'm not a nuclear physicist but from what I've learned, almost all of an atomic blast's power comes from EXTREMELY intense x-rays. The fireball and mushroom cloud is what you get when those x-rays superheat the air, and that pressure wave from the expanding air is the explosion. Since there's almost zero atmosphere in space, (yes there is a little) then what you mostly have is the blinding flash and x-ray typhoon. This spreads out in all directions, and because there's no atmosphere to interact with, it loses very little of its power over distance. (just the cube law due to expanding distance) So area of effect is much larger in space, but if you can resist the x-rays (ie not get directly damaged by them, and not give them something to heat up) you're good. Holes in the hull, on the other hand, are a problem. Bullets, like xrays, don't slow down in space, and unlike on earth, don't lose any of their potency over long range. A 50 cal in space is incredibly dangerous if you need to breathe or keep your fuel tanks intact and engineering working, There's also a powerful electromagnetic pulse, and honestly I don't think people give that enough credit. And then there's the different KINDS of nuclear bombs. Go google "neutron bomb" for an example of a more purpose-built nuke. It doesn't do much damage, it just KILLS EVERYTHING and ground-zero is usable by the attackers in a much shorter period of time. And there are varieties that are specifically designed to release the strongest possible EMP. Nukes have a lot more applications than simply "blowing stuff up"

@@backupplan6058 Consider the Project Orion nuclear rocket (real). It would have a large, heavy steel pusher plate and a gun for launching small nuclear bombs through the plate, 1 per second. The nuke was to detonate and push on the pusher plate as a very powerful source of thrust. Experiments were done and it was found that the steel plate could tolerate this onslaught quite easily. Think of the armor plating of the Battlestar as something like the pusher plate of Orion to realize that nukes could be tolerated (to a degree).

Presumably both Cylons and Colonials are aware of the limitations of nuclear weapons in space and have designed their weapons to compensate. In real life humans have tested such exotic weapons as shaped nuclear charges and bomb-pumped lasers. As I recall, bomb-lasers are a common weapon in the Honor Harrington book series. They were also featured in "Footfall", by Niven and Pournelle.

Well, they did end up trying here, because it was networked this time, so I guess it's expected?

Why wouldn't they try every engagement? It can't take that many resources to probe their computer systems for weaknesses, even if they've already shown to be defending against that weakness in prior engagements. If you detect that the computers are networked, you divert more power to that task since it is shown as a promising vector of attack.

Leaking atmosphere,fuel...

In a previous scene, they said that networking all of their systems together would significantly reduce the time need to calculate where the rest of the Fleet had jumped to. Unfortunately, this also enabled the Cylons to hack into the network through the Galactica's external comm systems, though they weren't able to instantly bypass its firewall like they did with the rest of Colonial Fleet due to the CNP not being present, therefore the system lacked the back door that allowed the Cylons to disable every other ship.

There's battlestar galactica deadlock for one. There's also diaspora which is fan made and is therefore not cannon sadly though that being said it's so lore friendly it may as well be (even explains how galactica got a handful of mk7s after all of theirs got destroyed)

Ghostx141x Gaming Battlestar Galactica Deadlock

That game was shutdown last year I think.

Deadlock Modern Ships Pack DLC gives you the ships and fighters from this series too 🙂

Battlestar Galactica Online was shut down a few years ago, but since then a new private server was created. I just discovered it a few weeks ago. They completely rebuilt the game and there are quite a few players duking it out like the old days. The best part is you get essentially unlimited Cubits so you can max you everything you want so you're not getting rekt by P2W players.

You say that like it's a bad thing

The same thing is true for doctors watching medical dramas.

They didn't consult with you to design the Galactica's systems or that of her class of ships.

Like most internal networks, the ship's internal systems are connected with an extremely complex network, and rely on their connectivity to function. Just think of how useless a fire suppression system would be if it would only activate directly over the fire, AND not set off any fire alarms AND not generate a warning for damage control? Think of all the inter-ship communications the people use. Giving your fighers orders, fire control radar... the list is never-ending. In this case, Galactica had to interface its sensors with its computers, through the internal network, and yet the cylons were basically hacking in by riding in on the sensors. If you need people to be able to move in and out the front door, you'd better have a good bouncer.

@@virt1one Couldn't agree more which is why my inner network engineer is screaming when Adama in the mini series says not one computer is networked that simply cannot work for a ship like the Galactica. My only theory which would work with your statement is each system like Comms, Life support, Weapons control, Engine Control, each has there own internal network to there subsystems and sensors and such and instead those systems are kept isolated and in this case they simply networked those systems together. Still if your gonna do that make sure you got one hell of a firewall. But really no ship like Galactica could function effectively without computer networking it would take ages for commands to be acted out