[Tabitha]

needed to land a fighting force, based on the ships used in the last Cylon war. It was here that the Cylons had tipped their hand without realizing it. They had simply improved the basic design of their landing ships over the years, which meant that the VDF was not only familiar with the design, but also with the performance of the ships. As such, the VDF was well aware that any invasion force would have to be based from Port Devotion. A decision was made to limit the development of Port Harmony to 65% of the size of Port Devotion. With the entire invasion force limited to two ports, which were entirely unsuited to handling the massive Cylon ships, the number, quality of support, and ability to reinforce the invasion was crippled from the start.
The bombing campaign failed, due to the lack of ability to launch large bombers, since they were destroyed with the landing barge, as well as the highly effective VDF anti-aircraft abilities. The ground assault failed due to the inability to land sufficient ground forces, as well as the lack of ability to move those troops to strategic positions once landed. This meant a long slow fight over tough terrain and constant guerilla style attacks by the militia and VDF. Knowing that the technologically superior Centurions would enjoy initial success, the VDF commanders wisely traded terrain for strength, allowing the Cylons to drive deep into their lines. The Cylons were then faced with long weak supply lines, and large weak fronts. The Cylons miss-interpreted the ease of their initial drives as weakness of the VDF, which made perfect sense to them, since they had underestimated the VDF to begin with. Since they had concluded that the VDF would not put up much of a resistance anyhow, it never occurred to the Cylons to see the situation as anything other than what it was, a trap, into which the Cylons marched with not second thoughts.
The lack of Cylon armor was also due to the destruction of the invasion barge. The VDF was able to put much of their armored forces into battle early on, to route the Cylon advances away from most of the civilian shelters, which reduced civilian casualties greatly. The Cylons didn’t question this, interpreting it as a move by the VDF to try to counter-attack.
Plucky isn’t exactly the best word to describe the VDF, but it certainly comes pretty close. The VDF were able to react faster to the Cylon tactics than the Cylons were able to change tactics. The VDF ability to bring out their own air power to counter the large number of Advanced Raiders shocked the Cylons. The Cylon commanders were immediately placed on the defensive and never recovered the initiative. The heavy Raiders were excellent in space, and even in light gravity wells, but in the atmosphere, they were no better than the Vipers, and were no match at all for the old Jaguars. When the VDF pulled their Mk2F’s engines and began to place them in the engine compartments of the Jaguars, the result was an aircraft that not only was far superior to the Raider in atmosphere, but was just different enough that the Cylons did not recognize it as the older Jaguar, and they spent far too much time and effort trying to research an aircraft, taking precious resources away from their war effort.
The introduction of the Avalon and her compliment of Prowler stealth craft compounded the Cylon problems. Since the Cylons had lost their invasion barge, they also lost communication with the rest of the Cylon invasion forces. The result was that the Cylons had no idea things had gone so horribly wrong for them on Virgon. They never sent the much needed reinforcements, nor did they investigate the odd silence of their “far superior” invasion force, since it was never considered even remotely possible that the VDf could achieve any real margin of victory, much less nearly destroy the invasion forces before they were launched.
The arrival of the Avalon would have been high priority for the Cylons, but the Virgon invasion forces had no idea it was there until it was far too late, and had no ability to report that information even if they had known. The arrival of the Shadx and the Prendle simply compounded the problem.
The only factor that the Cylons could not have predicted, had they used better intelligence and had they also considered that the VDF strength properly, the obvious bottle-neck of the two ports, and had they anticipated the possibility of losing their invasion barge and had a secondary barge sent, was the military leadership of the VDF in general. The VDF was not the simple militia that the rest of the colonies assumed it to be. The case that even the other colonies under-estimated the VDF led the Cylons to basically dismiss it as a viable military threat to them. The leadership of the VDF was not the typical peacetime officer pool that the rest of the colonies drew from. From the top down, the VDF filtered out all but the most experienced, best trained officers. That command staff, of elite officers, each combat experienced and all from the best academies, each built their units under the colonial special-forces model. Even the two year inductees performing their mandatory term in high school were trained and treated as elite military units. The yearly eight week