Battlestar Galactica Survived Because the Fleet Stopped Caring About It

An officer from the most advanced Battlestar in the fleet looks at Galactica and basically asks how this thing is still flying. It's a fair question, since the ship was about to become a museum. My answer is that the fleet stopped caring about Galactica, and that's why it survived.

Everything the fleet actually valued, the top of the line ships, the integrated systems, the newest fighters, all lost. The ship it figured wasn't worth anything anymore is the one that made it.

Galactica was built offline on purpose, and a Cylon was giving the tour

Almost all of the Battlestars built for the first Cylon War were gone by the time of the attack, either destroyed or out of service. Galactica was one of the last, maybe the very last, and it was being turned into a museum. On its final day, the fleet's PR officer walks a group of reporters through the ship and explains why it was built the way it was. He says it was designed to operate against an enemy who could infiltrate and disrupt even the most basic computer systems, and adds: "Galactica is a reminder of a time when we were so frightened by our enemies that we literally looked backwards for protection."

The ship was built offline on purpose because in the first war, the Cylons got into anything that was networked. And the guy explaining all of this is Doral. Doral is a Cylon. So the fleet's official tour of the ship built to keep the Cylons out is being run by a Cylon, which is maybe all you need to know about how seriously anyone was taking that lesson.

Forty years of peace pushed the fleet toward networking and the CNP

Then the fleet had 40 years of peace, and over those 40 years it started networking and integrating everything. During the first war, that would have been unheard of. My read is that a new generation came up that had never fought a war. They were confident they could beat any system the Cylons threw at them, and they got a little egotistical.

The center of all this is the command navigation program, the CNP. Gaius Baltar's program ended up linked to about 95% of the fleet, and Six, the woman Baltar has been seeing, mentions that she rewrote half of its algorithms. Baltar has no idea she's a Cylon. He let her into the system because, let's be honest, he really wasn't thinking with his head.

I don't want to just rake the fleet over the coals here, though. We'll see later that an integrated system can actually work, and work really well. We don't know how the CNP would have done in a fair fight with no virus and no Six. In my opinion, the failure wasn't actually the integrated systems. It was who the fleet trusted.

Commander Adama's rule kept Galactica off the network

Commander Adama refused to have networked computers on his ship while he was in command. He was a veteran of the first Cylon War, and in that war, networked computers got people killed. In his words: "It's an integrated computer network and I will not have it aboard this ship." When someone suggests he's actually afraid of computers, he answers that there are many computers on the ship. They just aren't networked.

Call it paranoia if you want. He watched what happened the last time and decided it wasn't happening on his ship. He enforced that rule everywhere he could. Ships that came aboard Galactica still had to land manually, even if they were networked and running the CNP everywhere else. You confirm it when Lee shows up. He asks why they don't use auto landing and gets told it's all done by hand because the commander says so.

The CNP itself was delivered to Galactica, and it was never loaded into the main memory. I find that word interesting. Main memory suggests it had been sitting on a drive somewhere, maybe in the backup systems in case they ever needed it. Either way, it was never running. We're never told who decided not to load it, but I think it was Adama. He's really the only logical answer.

The best evidence for that comes later, in the Battlestar Galactica episode Scattered. Adama's unconscious, Tigh is in command, and Tigh agrees to network the computers to find the fleet. The crew keeps bringing up the old man's standing rule: no integration, ever. Adama never has to say a word. Everyone on that ship already knows he'd never allow it. As Tigh is told, "The old man would never do this, Colonel. No computer networks on his ship."

The fleet let Adama get away with it, but only inside his own hull

So yes, the popular answer is true. Adama's rule kept Galactica offline, and that's a big part of why it survived. And the fleet let him get away with it. Galactica wasn't a top of the line ship, nor was it the first one into a fight, and Adama was retiring. There was no reason to fight him on that specific topic. Maybe there was even a little respect for the old man in there.

His rule stopped at his own hull, though. Past that, everything was the fleet's call. Galactica was being stripped for retirement, and anything still useful was going somewhere else. The munitions were already gone. It still had modern fighters, but they were launching and heading elsewhere.

Galactica's modern Vipers went dark, and the museum Mark IIs flew instead

A squadron of Mark VII Vipers launches off Galactica, and we're never told where they're going. My guess is that they were being sent off with the other assets, because that's what you do with a ship you're decommissioning. You take all of its defenses with you.

Then they run into two Cylon Raiders. The Vipers lose power all at once, like someone just flipped a switch, and the Raiders take them apart. The Raptor with them is the only thing that kept its power. Maybe the virus just never hit it, or maybe it's because Boomer was aboard, a Cylon sleeper who didn't even know she was one yet. Nothing on screen really tells us.

Back on Galactica, they know there's a war, and they're trying to get ready for it. They've got pilots and no ships, so they go into the museum and get the old Mark II Vipers in the air. Nobody on Galactica even knew about the CNP yet. They picked the Mark IIs because they were all that was left. And this is where it all comes together. What the fleet valued couldn't stand up to the Cylons. The junk was what kept flying.

Pegasus might have survived because its systems were already down

Ironically, Galactica wasn't the only Battlestar that would make it out. Pegasus was docked at the Scorpia Fleet Shipyard for a 3 month overhaul. The first sign anything was wrong was nukes hitting the shipyard. They didn't know what was going on, just that they were under attack. Five ships, including two Battlestars, were destroyed almost instantly, and Pegasus lost around 700 of its crew.

Pegasus's systems were down for the updates when the attack happened. Aboard the ship, the network is described as letting you control just about any part of the ship from any other with the right passcodes, like having unlimited backups in an emergency, except that the system was down for the retrofit. Then the attack knocked out the rest of the computers. Personally, I think that might be what saved them. With the computers knocked out, there was nothing left to hack, and the crew had to do everything by hand. They'd find the CNP backdoor later, once the systems came back up.

With no computers, they had no way to calculate a jump. That's where Cain comes in. She said jump anywhere, and she didn't care if they ended up inside a sun. It was a desperate move, and it worked.

Two Number Sixes with the same face worked the fleet's systems

There's one more piece. The Pegasus network administrator was Gina, another Number Six, with the same face as the Six who rewrote half the CNP. One was on the operations side of a Battlestar, and the other was on Caprica walking around in public with Gaius Baltar. Two people with the exact same face in the exact same field, and nobody noticed.

To be fair, the Cylons only had so many models to work with. They couldn't give every agent a new face. Getting caught was never a sure thing, but they got away with this one. Was that overconfidence, or did they just not have a choice?

I don't think the fleet was stupid, I think it made a trade

So now you've got two Battlestars that survived, and neither of them survived by design. Was it ego? Was the fleet just careless? I don't think the fleet was stupid. I want to make that clear. I think they made a trade.

Go back to Scattered. Galactica lost the fleet, and finding it with computers that aren't networked 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 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.

Cain outranks Adama, and track record never enters into it

Then Pegasus shows up, and Cain outranks Adama, so she takes command of both vessels. Rank decides who's in charge. Track record never enters into it. The commander whose rule kept Galactica alive is now taking orders from the admiral whose ship survived because it was in maintenance.

Go back to Fisk, staring at the old ship and asking how it's still here. 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 yourself.

If you had to pick a command the morning before the attack, which one would you have wanted?