Most of the time they live up to their name and function mainly as bases. They blink in with their FTL drive, launch Raiders and nukes, but don’t seem designed for much dodging around.
But we’ve seen them recently blinking into a system, heading for a planet then “stopping” and taking up an orbit around a planet.
How they do that?
One theory I have is since they seem to store their Raiders along the “arms” they might network the Raiders and use them for thrust.
Or, maybe it’s not the Raiders but they use lots of similar, small thrusters along the arms.
Any other ideas? There doesn’t seem to be any large thruster nozzle thingies like the Galactica has.
More seriously, the Colonial tech is deliberately more primitive, with the backstory that they’d retreated from previously higher-level tech because of its vulnerability during and association with the Cylon Wars.
The Cylons never deliberately regressed their technology. They might, for example, have put the mysterious gravity technology that both the Battlestars and Basestars have, to better use in maneuvering their ships.
I had the impression that this regression only applied to computer/networking/communication technology, not pure engineering stuff like spaceship propulsion.
Don’t forget all the new, high tech Colonial equipment was destroyed because Baltar revealed some code to the Cylons that allowed them to shut them all down.
Colonial technology ~30-years ago was capable of building the original, sentient Centurions. It doesn’t appear capable of doing so, anymore. Also, Cylon bio-technology is much more advanced than Colonial science. Cylon jump capability is better than Colonial – that might be due to Cylon computing, but then Starbuck’s lobotomized-Raider duplicated the capability with that laptop she was using to run it. All evidence points to Cylon technology being more advanced than Colonial across the board.
The only thing that was destroyed by Baltar’s virus in his navigation program was the networked computers on military ships other than the Galactica, and the navigation systems on the newer Vipers that had to be retrofitted.
Vipers and Raptors have maneuvering thrusters that visibly expel something that’s functioning like reaction mass. We don’t see that on any of the larger ships, and I don’t recall if the Raiders (or Heavy Raiders) have something similiar when they go all flippy-ship in combat.
Yeah, but how can you tell if they still have that centurion technology or not, when the facilities that would have been capable of it are long gone? I mean, humans now are cloning bladders and building rockets and stuff, but if you gathered together a bunch of random military people and civilians do you think you could build a bladder? Would you even know we could?
I can tell if they have the Centurion-level technology by the fact that they were pretty clueless about Cylon technology altogether – even Baltar, Mr. Knows-It-All. They also didn’t have a good grasp on the new Centurion capabilities – they’ve been relying on Sharon for information – until she told Adama they’d been programmed not to distinguish between versions of the human models, it wasn’t even clear if they knew whether or not these Centurions were sentient.
Also, Pegasus was a state-of-the-art Battlestar, and they got no better understanding of Cylon (or Centurion) technology when Pegasus joined the fleet. If there was any place that had Centurion-building technology, it would’ve been on that Battlestar (since Battlestars are apparently equiped with sufficient manufacturing capability to make entire new Vipers, and now possibly new nuclear warheads).
Also, Ron Moore has stated that the Colonies abandoned their higher technology in the aftermath of the Cylon Wars. But I know a lot of people don’t like citing extra-canon sources like that.
The Colonials Retro technology seems to have the same problem as their previous incarnation. You’ll note the Galactica is always seen with its engines firing away. Are they trying to constantly accellerate to excape the cylons (Must be hard to slow down to go into orbit) or do they just want to get rid of all of that excess fuel for no reason?
I never noticed that before this season but I’m glad you brought it up. The Galactica seems to always have blue flame/thrust coming out the back, even when it’s seemingly just sitting there with the fleet.
It’s a little distracting every time I see it now. It looks like it’s always in the middle of a hard acceleration.
Because the writers/director/FX team/CGI designers, in this and in most SF series (Babylon 5 being a notable exception, sometimes, e.g., the design of the Starfuries) still haven’t grasped that spaceships do not move like airplanes, seagoing ships, or submarines. E.g., any of the latter require constant propulsion to move at all and can brake just by reducing the propulsive force, because they are moving against a resistant material medium; whereas a spaceship moves at constant velocity, never slowing down, unless and until its engines are used to accelerate or decelerate it. Also, a Viper is designed to maneuver in vacuum or atmosphere – but it would not move the same way in the one medium as the other – same reasons; and we should also expect a noticeable discontinuity of movement at the moment a Viper gets out of range of the artificial-gravity field that holds it down on the deck of the docking bay. Also, spaceships have truly three-dimensional freedom of movement; therefore the ships of the Fleet, even if all moving in the same direction, would not all be oriented towards the same “down” direction, but on different planes of motion, as a fleet of submarines would – unless Adama ordered them to align that way for some reason, and none comes to mind.
Someday they’ll do one of these series with a physicist or NASA aerospace engineer for tech consultant and they’ll get it right, or as right as you can get it allowing for the indispensable heavy blackboxing of any series predicated on interstellar travel.
Galactica obviously needs continual thrust because they’re flying through an outer space that has weather: Ragnar Anchorage, the New Caprica nebula, and now the turbulent star cluster around the Algae Planet. We may take this space weather as evidence that there is some medium through which the Galactica is passing, which must be causing sufficient drag for the Galactica to need its propulsion at all times.
See? it all makes sense if you just think about it for a bit. :dubious: