It probably was a year. Was the above a plot component, or an example you created? My point being their sensors are not FTL.
It’s been pretty much established that the FTL drives don’t have infinite range. If you know your target has to pop up within x light years and you know they need to stop off for particular resources, all of a suddent that galaxy isn’t so big. Also, the humans and the Cylons are looking for the same thing - Earth. The Cylons also specifically state in one episode “what do they care if it takes a thousand years to find Earth, they’re machines.”
They are a little vague on the technology, but because of the size and the nature of the battlestars, I can suspend my disbelief and pretend that they are able to operate self-contained, in space with a minimum amount of support for years in necessary. The Galactica’s fleet also seems to contain various industrial ships that can manufacture fuel, spare parts and ammunition from raw materials.
So the Pegasus, alone and canibilizing any ships it encountered was engaged in what would be a very brief suicide mission. They would have been able to engage the Cyclons maybe once or twice more before they were out of aircraft, ammo and spare parts or enough crew had been killed that they could no longer maintain operations.
The Galactica, on the other hand, is part of a relatively self-sustaining fleet and they pretty much avoid combat unless there is a strategic imperative.
Also, if you just refused an order from your insane commander and he/she requests your sidearm, maybe you might want to go ahead and refuse that order as well.
I’m pretty sure there was something funky about the planet’s atmosphere which masked them from the Cylons, somehow. Or maybe it was a nebula. We know how Ron Moore loves nebulas.
Anyway, the Cylons discovered them via old-fashioned fast-as-light means, but I’ve never been absolutely certain if their sensors are all FTL or not. I think it depends on the plot that episode.
It only takes one. For all we know, there’s a three-dimensional grid of single Cylon raiders stationed a light-year apart throughout known space.
Well, yeah. I mean here are a couple of problems if you think about it too hard. If it’s so easy to jump long distances (like 100s of light years), why are only 12 colonies colonized?
Here’s how I figure it: The 12 colonies are relatively close together but it still takes days, weeks or even months to travel between them. That’s why all the ships seem very large and designed for long trips. Beyond the neighborhood of the 12 colonies is probably a vast wasteland of planets unsuitable for colonization - large enough that it has never been economically practical to explore beyond it with current FTL drives. Basically the action is confined to a relatively small region of the galaxy.
As for the Cylons tracking the fleet - as of now, there are 3 known (previously unknown) Clyon’s in the fleet, and there were more of the “known” model there (at one time) - its not unreasonable that they had a hand in the ability to keep pace.
Secondly, it was stated/implied in several episodes that they had made ‘lots’ of jumps and it was at one point they decided they had jumped far enough that they felt it safe to stand down for repairs/what not.
The 12 colonies in one system thing was taken directly from the original show and we’re stuck with it. Joss Whedon put 100’s of colonies around one star. Whatcha gonna do?
At one point early on in his blog, Ron Moore said he sort of envisioned that humans and suffered some sort of civilizational catastrophe shortly after colonizing the 12 colonies. My fan wank is by the time they reinvented space travel they got caught up in civil wars, and around the time they reinvented FTL they also invented the Cylons and got caught up in a war with them. The Cylons basically rendered the surrounding space too dangerous to explore/colonize so the Colonials were kinda stuck more or less blockaded by the Cylons.
There’s definitely a theme of “wandering the wilderness” in the new BG. There’s the twelve colonies, there’s Kobol, and then there’s (so far) exactly two planets with oxygen atmospheres and rudimentary life- probably seeded millennia earlier about the time the colonies were founded. And this after they’ve traveled at least hundreds of light years. This is NOT like Star Trek or the original BG, where inhabitable planets were so common as to not be noteworthy. In the first season, they considered themselves lucky to find ordinary water in a form that could be purified.
My guess is, when the FTL drive was invented (rediscovered?), a quick survey revealed the local galactic neighborhood to be utterly barren. In addition to the mathematics of calculating jumps, there’s also the factor that jumps are unpleasant bordering on traumatic- only running for their lives could convince most people to suffer this many repeated constant jumps. And finally processed Tylium has a limited storage life- if you’re going any long distance, you need to carry raw ore and a refinery with you. Maybe eventually someone would have put together an exploratory fleet that looked at the most likely candidate stars for habitable planets; but the first Cylon war intervened. Heck, the Cylons were originally intended to help the Colonials maintain an expanded infrastructure in space. not needing air or organic food.