Sorry I missed it. Never saw the show.
The episode available for viewing online on the SciFi website is titled “Scar”. It features the “flip & shoot” technique…
My only major complaint about the physics of the space combat is the BSG itself, when it opens up with all the flak cannons. What’s that, a bazillion tons of pressure against one side of the ship? If they’d put in some counter-thrusters, or better yet show the BSG using the kick to perform simultaneous evasion, I’d be in hog heaven.
So say we all. I’ve been out of it for awhile, when does the new season start? And when does the spinoff Caprica get started?
With nothing to measure the movement against, how do you know that the Galactica doesn’t move? Although it would take a tremendous amount of force to overcome the inertia of all that mass.
It’s belt fed and looks like 20mm cannon shells. Explosive or solid. It has tracers, I believe. And a very flat trajectory. 
Bosda, were you asking about the cannons on the Vipers or on the cap ships? The Galactica and the Pegasus both carry some big freaking guns, which Ron Moore has been very careful about not giving specifics for.
There’s 24 of the buggers on the Galactica. They appear to be rail guns of some sort, each mounted on a ginormous turret. They appear to fire payloads roughly 2 to 4 meters in diameter.
The projectiles themselves emit a lot of glowing junk during flight. My WAG is that they’re some kind of barely-contained badass shit (antimatter? week-old spam? Rainbow Brite stickers?) whose magnetic bottle is slowly decaying in flight.
the Pegasus has even more of the turrets, but she also has about 6-8 bow-mounted guns, which are presumably more powerful.
re: the point defense systems… One of my favorite combat scenes is from early in the first season. The Cylons launch figters and missiles at the Galactica. The Galactica opens up the point defense guns. (It’s quite the pretty fireworks show, this halo of fire around the Galactica.) The camera shows the Cylon fighters diving into this lethal mess, and once they start taking losses they turn and fly back towards relative safety. We then hear a bridge crewman announce “we’ve established a perimeter”, after which the Vipers are launched. It’s just… the cool clockwork military procedure of the scene that makes me geek out. I mean, I know next to nothing about the logistics of carrier warfare, but this scene just looked right to me.
Ooh, I just remembered a website with all this BSG geekiness - Battlestar Wiki. The third season is almost upon us; I need to go back and re-read much of that website now. 
According to battlestarwiki and wikipedia (along with a Galactica book I saw at Borders), it’s a 30mm.
And according to the same book, the missiles are supposed to be "HD-70 Lightning Javelin"s, but didn’t show an example of them, which is why I asked.
Thanks for the info, btw, everyone!
Something I absolutley LOVE about the BFTs on the Galactica… you notice the cockpit in the middle of them? Each of those things is being aimed and fired by a gunner sitting inside! 
Judging from the miniseries, they also explode, spraying a cone-shaped area (an expanding sphere that is itself moving forward at great speed, thus, a cone-shaped area) with what appears to be shrapnel. Could be the shrapnel itself is simply rapidly expanding BAS (Bad Ass Shit) particles or antimatter or something.
Oh, you know what I loved about that too? Aside from the droning sound of all the guns going off at once? “Commence Defensive Supression Barrage.” That’s an order that just makes goosebumps go running up and down my back.
As for missles and Cylon tomfoolery, the Colonials need to go low-high tech. Sure, sophisticated radar guided missiles or missiles that rely on constant updates from a control ship can get fouled up by Cylon ECM, but something like a sidewinder would work fine. Note that the AIM-9 Sidewinder was introduced in the 1950s, and is still the bread-and-butter missile of air-to-air engagements in the US military today. It’s so simple, it’s perfect.
Granted, the Cylons would eventually figure out the usefulness of flares (assuming they could come up with a practical way for flares to work in space) but surely an IR guided missile would be at least a bit useful against them?
And as numerous people have said, Babylon 5 is an excellent example of awesome space fighter combat. Especially the 4th season, where you see opposing forces using fighters posessing VERY similar abilities to pirroete, spin, flip, and stop in space.
As for why the vipers bank-and-turn, this could be explained as the pilots making “clearing maneuvers”, tilting the plane to make sure there’s nothing that they will fly into when they turn. Also, a banking turn would put somewhat less confusion on a human’s internal up-finding equipment than a flip-and-boost would do, I think.
Oh, something else fun about carrier warfare in the BSG universe: Something that I don’t think EVER happens IRL in terms of fighter combat, is a furball (lots of dogfights) going on while the carrier is preparing to leave the area via FTL.
The carrier can’t leave without it’s fighters, because without the fighters, it’s helpless, and without the carier, the fighters are stuck (and likely doomed). The carrier can’t recall it’s fighters and THEN leave, because once it looses it’s fighter umbrella, it’s gonna get pounded.
The solution? Make all the preperations to leave, and have the fighters return at the LAST POSSIBLE INSTANT before the ship leaves, presumably with some groups of fighters covering for other retreating groups. In the miniseries, Starbuck and Apollo (their fighters more or less attached for reasons that don’t bear explaining at this juncture), cut it so close that they bump a wingtip on the closing hanger doors as they land, and the ship jumps almost before they’re done skidding accross the landing deck amongst all the other landed fighters (incidentally, how would YOU love to land on a runway, and find somewhere to be out of the way while others are landing at EXACTLY the same time?)
As well as apollo in the first season , tellin everyone to stay the frack out of the galactica’s solution.
Someone has been boning up on military terms , on the production side.
Declan
Except…
They wouldn’t be able to do any of that, what with the spotlights inside their helmets, illuminating faces for us tv viewers, but wrecking their night vision.
It’s common in SciFi, but it bugs me to no end.
Cool, but I still like “Break out the Compression Phaser Rifles.”
Would a craft without the engine running (as they would be most of the time) be hot enough to target?
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It seems to me that while the fighter would turn on an axis to the pilot, and observer would see bank and turn. If you used x amount of thrust to go forward, you’d have to apply -x amount to stop. Using a thrister to spin on the axis and point backwards would look to an observer not on the ship as an Immelman. (sp)
I’ll retract that. You could do it with a thruster on the nose and another on the tail working about the center of mass and pitch without changing attitude.
Actually none of it looks “right” to me because the whole purpose of carrier warfare is that the aircraft allow the carreir to project force beyond gun and visual range. The whole problem with the Battle of Midway style warfare in most scifi is that it doesn’t make sense to me to send tiny little fighters against massive ships a mile or more long bristling with railguns, miniguns, lasers, and/or force fields.
The other problem is that if those point defense guns are anything like a modern CWIS cannon, they would run out of ammo within a few minutes fireing a constant barrage like that.
I actually want to see a space battle with realistic energy weapons. No glowing balls of crap, sublight bolts of light or incandescent beams. Maybe something like this.
And another flaw IMHO is that the fighters look like they are designed to fight in an atmosphere – wings and a tail, cockpit orientation, etc. A** space** should be more symmetrical around the axes. Maybe spherical, or wirh six rotatable thrusters on booms out from a central hub so the pilot can direct nearly all the thrust along any desired vector.
I imagine the military would need completely different designs for atmospheric as oppsoed to outer space combat. They are such different environments that a purpose built fighter in its element could beat the shit out of some compromise design. Well, unless you throw in a lot MORE sci-fi tech stuff like gravity and friction nullifiers.
Someting more like this, yes. Though even with this design, it seems more oriented toward attack and maneuver along a single vector. Perhaps this would in fact tun out to be optimal as far as pilot orientation goes, but not for good combat computers.
Me, too. As long as we have people flying the things, we are going to prefer straight-line approaches whenever possible. That old monkey-brain will trip us up every time.
How did I know that would be Babylon 5 before a clicked? 
Does seem odd to have control surfaces in a vacumn. Obviously they also do atmospheric flight. Perhaps the Battlestar normally carries them to the planet and they fly atmospheric. The colonies did fight wars with each other, did they not? The purpose of space combat when not running for your life from toasters would be to take planets and you’d have to go to the surface and fight unless you were content to nuke the joint from orbit and simply deny it to your enemy rather than use it yourself.