Damocles,
From what I understand - items "STATED" as being seen or heard on the show are to be taken as cannon. Those are listed as such in the article. The rest is based on cannon fact or items infered from cannon.


TANKERS:
Noticed a lot of talk on the subject of how the Radiers got to the point to meet their Tankers for refueling before the attack at Cimtar being dropped off or having special "Gate" ships, etc. As per Cannon Apollo and Zac discovered 2 of the tankers just before they came up on the attack fleet.

It is suposed they flew from a point from their Basestars to there to be refueled by their tankers. Why then could it not be possible for them to fly to SEVERAL tanker refueling points till they were in their launch positions to jump off for the attack. Supposing that, the Basestars wouldn't have to come close and risk being picked up on scans or by patrols and the Cylons could sneak their attack force into place piecemeal till it was ready. After the attack the Basestars could move in for recovery of their craft.

Some real physics-or as real as the numbers of QM allow.

To inflate a basestar-sized worm hole requires 1500 solar masses equivalent of negative entropic energy. That is for a 1000 meter radius wormhole.

Now that is enough room for the basestar but not for a halo of Raiders in tow or close-grouped around it. And that is energy expended per second inflated.

I give you the basestar ferry option or the jumpgate option. I like the jumpgate option myself because the investment in materials and screen evidence closely match that solution. I don't see the Raiders towed by those tankers.(Remember the night,masre of the Gemini mission that lassoed the Agena rocket with which they rendevouzed in 1967? That snarl would be nothing compared to 100 tow cables......

I don't beleve in tractor beams. Magnets on the other hand? ;) The hull of that freighter doesn't have enough surface area to hold 100 Raiders without some of them skidding off. :D

There are time issues that prohibit you from asssuming that the Cimtar ambush is organized as a staged Cylon Raider phased fly in.

Basic argument boils down to the idea that the Raider has but about a few hours endurance, and that the relative delta vee on those rockets is limited to accelerations of about .01c. For Galactica to get to Caprica to respond to the distress call as quick as it did required a micro-jump or else Cimtar was within minutes of Caprica instead of the more likely hours(all deltas are assumed to be c)

The clearesat and logistically least complex explanation to my mind is the one that the film seems to show. The Cylons massed their Raiders in their hide by jumping the Raiders straight into the assembly area by gate or by carrier. The tankers could jump in independentlly and engage in a refuelling evolution that would be simple dock, tank up, and peel off from the otherwise powered down free drifting raiders.

No need for tow lines, no need for more than the few tankers seen and it explains all those Raiders out in the middle of nowhere without basestar support.

The canon evidence the article cites seems to support a more damaged Colonies than I saw. It would make me wonder if President Adar was a complete fool to accept the offer of a peace conference if the Cylons had such an obvious advantage and didn't push it as circumstances should have suggested. I have to think about that and come up with an explanation.

Hmmmm.....I think we may have a misunderstanding. Let me retrench, here, and go back on to the "jump/tramline" idea.

I'm using that idea directly from the Niven/Pournelle "Future History" series("The Mote In God's Eye", and "The Gripping Hand"), and the "Mercenary/Prince" series that runs in conjunction.

Basically, you sidle up to the region of space where the jump-point is located, and activate the drive. The drive generates a spherical displacement field, and moves everything within that field to the opposite end of the tramline connection(i.e., the next star over).

The travel is instantaneous; there is no "wormhole" per DS9 or B5. It's literally: drive-on/drive-off/you're-there.

Once in the destination system, you slog along under conventional chemical energy drives or whatever to get to either the system primary, or the next jump-point. Whatever real-space velocity you had at the point-of-origin, you retain on arrival (which can occasionally make things very interesting).

There were never any figs given AFAIK for the Alderson Drive(the name from the original Niven/Pournelle series) as regards power requirements, so I'm ballparking the size of the displacement field[s].

What this means in the Cimtar example is that the Raiders don't have to anchor onto the tanker's hulls, they simply need to get close to the tanker, close enough to be enveloped by the displacement field. At Cimtar, they would "shake out" until they inserted into the cloud.

Maintaining a tight and relatively static formation shouldn't present any real trouble for the Cylon Raiders(five columns of five Raiders, spaced radially around the tankers' cylindrical body), as the Cylon attack waves that we see onscreen are pretty tight formations, as is.....Of course, the RTFF using this system would be..."interesting" is somehow inadequate :D

**nods head** Yep...That's my take on it. I think that the Colonies had suffered a series of military reverses in the couple of years/yahren previous to Cimtar that made them susceptable[sp?] to a peace offer. It's clear that not all of the Council were fully convinced; Adama may have been the only one vocal about it, though.

That's why I have no trouble postulating c.15 operational battlestars patrolling the Colonial system, while five escort the President and Council to Cimtar: the rest of the Fleet was in space dock, or had new keels building to try and replace losses.

Another question here is, was the point of the ambush to destroy or delay? It may have been simply to delay the main fleet until the damage had been done to the colonies. The success of the ambush may have been icing on the cake as it were.

Also, thinking about this more...and looking at WWII bomber raids, even accepting a higher state of technology, the cylon fighters we saw on screen basically just shot up the place. There would have to have been a much heavier attack, especially considering the size of a planet. Take Earth for example. If we estimate a cylon strike force of 3 basestars, and 3,000 fighters, how long would it take to really do some major damage to Earth? Just taking out the US alone would take a few hours.

Crossing series for a moment, if one looks at V, there was a mothership per major city. I think that show estimated 50 or so ships, each comparable to a Cylon Basestar. In the B5 universe (which has a comparable combat style to the BSG one) we see the Centari using a massive orbital bombardment against the Narns.

I think the Cylons would have initially used a combination of surgical strikes against military hard points (bases, air fields, defenses) before resorting to straffing runs on civilian targets.

Returning to the attack, it seems like they attacked in at least 2 waves. Tigh reports attacks being launched (present time) against the inner (??) colonies. This means that there was some time for some of the colonies to prepare for defense.

Per Cimtar: I would say, both...Get the battlestars so heavily-engaged that they can't retreat quickly, and destroy them if at all possible...

In the Colonies, I think you are spot-on: nail down the hard targets in the first wave, backed up by 'ortillery'(orbital fire support), cause some general hate and discontent(the seemingly mindless attacks on the plaza where Serina is broadcasting), and follow up with selective nuke bombardment and spraying with a fast-acting bio-agent to poison the food supply of any survivors(ref. the line in 'Saga': [approx] Jolly: "...We checked it for radiation, but not for Pluton poisoning..." Apollo: "Pluton? That breaks down the structure of food..."; likely a blight, like mold on Rye)

Cylons try to strike with superior numbers because they are "incapable of independent thought" which is a significant military weakness compared to independent free-thinking and highly adaptable humans.

It's like some sort of cybernetic blitzkreig, the trick is to have enough ships to overwhelm the humans because I can imagine the CF defeating a Cylon force that outnumbers them 3 or five to one.

Of course the odds are significantly reduced if you've fooled the enemy into thinking you're suing for peace. ;)

More "real" physics.(Here goes nothing :eek: )

Your micro-wormhole is curled space/time in the form of a "cell". When you inflate it; it looks for all the world to you like a spinning hypermass(misnamed blackhole) and acts the same way. It is not some Babylon 5 tunnel into hyperspace. You aim at the spinning event horizon "equator" of your inflated-wormhole at a tangent and slide in just under the c radius limit into one of the segmented "branes" of that flipped time/space where the three spatial ordinates have transposed positions with the time ordinate. You pop out into the other side of the event some distance(as determined by the peculiar relationships of spatial geometry and angular momentum in this "brane" if you did this correctly, alive and not knowing if any time has passed at all. Since all time in realspace is local and you displaced without crossing those quanta of space/time that are contiguous in ralspace between where you were amnd where you are, you cannot know if any time transpired at all for you in the wormhole transit.(Theory suggests that the local time you are inside the wormhole event horizon is about equal to 1/2 pi/r^2 of the microwormhole's inflated radius in seconds).

As a rough rule of thumb you need a hundred solar masses for each 100 meters of wormhole "brane" radius.

If you want to know the shape of the "brane" into which you skim/dive?

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourk...us/mobius3.gif

is a two dimensional representation of the four dimensional rotator manifold.

....Which fits in well with "machine logic": don't worry about quality if it's unnecessary, just steamroller as you can.

New thought: The rationale for a three-Cylon crew on a Raider - in the event that they have to land, they have a small group to compensate by numbers for their inferior performance one-on-one...

..Something GINO 2.0 never quite understood.... :D

I think the GINO cylons were specialists, where as the TOS cylons were general use.
Based on watching how mobile (or rather how not) they were, and how great their marksmanship was (did the go to Stormtrooper school?) It's hard to imagine them fielding an effective ground force.

Definately speacialists...As far as ground forces go, we didn't really see a lot of their ground forces, when you think about it. The only places I know of are at Carillon and in 'Lords', and in both places, there were problems with terrain(okay, and cost/shooting issues) that kept us from seeing a more diverse spread of ground combat tech.

That's one of the things I'd like to see in a remake/continuation: having the Gal run across the last ship of the Colonial equivalent of an MPS(Maritime Pre-Positioning Squadron), basically a military supply ship carrying a huge amount of gear for ground combat, but few/no troops...maybe a ship that also escaped, and has been trying to catch up ever since....

I'm trying to locate a picture that is kind of a memory, showing a Colonial assault team preparing to stage a hostage rescue during 'Baltars Escape'; I'm interested in it, because it's the only time, IIRC, that we see Colonial long guns/rifles....

One must remember, TOS cylons are superior, there are many copies and they too have a plan hahahahahahahahha

sorry it made sense in my head

tabbi

I think you can imagine it along the lines of the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The aim of the attack was to take out the "Big Units" (Carriers & Battleships) of the Fleet. Once this was done further strikes would take out the samller ships and support facilities. Once this was done the enemy would be able to operate with no oposition in their plan to take the Pacific.

Per Cimtar - you can look at it along the same lines. Once the Fleet was crippled the Cylons would be cleared to take on the Planitary defences and start the distruction of the Colonies.

The reason I go with this theory is, IMO, I don't think the Raider type ships would have the firepower to destroy the Colonies unless they were all toteing Nukes or something similar. The Cylons would have to bring in big "Bombardment" ships of some kind and to do that they would have to deal with the Colonal Fleet first.

:salute:

Jester,

I view it as "Pearl Harbor Meets The Phillipine Invasion", where the PI invasion is the most important part of the attack.....

I think you can view it more like an NFL game with the Phx Cardinals. Both sides have a team, and they know the game, but one side is destined to lose because they just suck at the game and the other side at least thought about a strategy to win, while the other side walked out with no clue they were playing yet.

tabbi

The only ceremonial ship at Cimtar that I know of was Star Kobol. There's no reference in the movies or the books that Atlantia was a mere ceremonial ship. In one of the books it mentions Atlantia's sister ship the Pacifica which was supposedly the biggest Battlestar ever constructed. I don't buy it that Atlantia was for ceremony only.

The question is though, what exactly was the "Star Kobol"? There are no references to any BattleStar called Kobol in any of the resources I found. Atlantia was refered to as the Presidential BattleStar though.

Pg 13 mentions that "with the destruction of the Atlantia's sister ship, the Pacifica, Adama's craft had become the largest fighting battlestar in the fleet."

Fighting BattleStar. Implying there were non-fighting ones.

the book continues to describe Atlantia as "a hive of bulkily designed sections", possibly implying it was of poor design, or a slapped together design.

Excellent take, Tab. You have come close, I think. With many battlefronts, as well as garrison sites and spacestations, what we saw at Cimtar cannot be the entire Colonial Fleet. The Cylons go for it because the President is aboard. Given their obsessively centralized mentality, the Cylons cannot conceive of their foes surviving once Adar and the top leadership are gone. Rememebr SB's comment that the "main attack is on the President's ship."

As to the slow response of the Fleet to the Cylon ambush. Imagine the following scenario.....
It is the fall/early winter of 1945, and somewhere in the Pacific, five top-of-the-line Fleet Carrier are cruising along towards Japan. Since the japanese have sued for peace, no one is expecting treachery. Most of the crews are at ease, most of the planes are on the hangar decks, undergoing maintenance or neatly tucked away, the pilots either asleep of loafing. Few anti-aircraft posts are manned. After all, the war is over, right?
Suddenly, radar picks up at least 1,000 aircraft, identified as Japanese, approaching at top speed, emerging from a weather front, 100 miles and closing. The alert is sounded. Pilots are roused and briefed as quickly as possible, planes are being hurridly fueled and armed, anti-aircraft is manned, planes hoisted to the flight decks, and the ships have to turn into the wind to launch. As you can see, they are NOT going to be ready once the enemy force reaches. A few planes may make it up, but barring a miracle, it will be total carnage.
Just an analogy.