The Colonial Fleet's Tech Trade Off and Why Galactica Survived

I don't think the Colonial fleet was stupid. I want to make that clear. I think they made a trade, and what they skipped was the vetting.

Two Battlestars survived, and neither of them survived by design. An officer on one ship built a firewall that held off the Cylons long enough to get the job done. So was it ego? Was the fleet just careless? How did this happen?

Galactica in "Scattered" shows how tempting networked speed was

Let's go back to "Scattered." Galactica lost the fleet, and finding it with the un-networked computers would take about 12 hours. Network the computers and it takes 10 minutes. Gaeta builds the firewall himself. The virus gets in fast and nearly breaks the last firewall in about the same 10 minutes.

But think about that. One officer on one ship built a firewall that held off the Cylons long enough to get the job done. Now imagine what all 12 colonies could have built if they'd worked on that together. And that's just finding the lost ships. Put that kind of speed across every system in the fleet and you can see why they wanted it.

The trade made sense, but nobody is shown vetting the CNP

The trade makes sense. What they skipped was the vetting. Nothing on screen shows anybody checking the CNP or checking the people working on it. Maybe somebody did and just didn't do it well. Either way, it didn't work.

Galactica's old rule links the forgotten ship to humanity's survival

So let's go back to Fisk, staring at the old ship and asking how it's still here. Why did this happen?

Put it all side by side. The forgotten ship, the museum Vipers, a rule the rest of the fleet walked away from 40 years ago. And now that ship is leading what's left of humanity. "You can draw the line between those."

Was networking the fleet a reasonable trade, or should the risk have outweighed the speed?