CYLON BASESTAR (RDM) | Maybe the worst ship EVER DESIGNED. It's meat | Battlestar Galactica Lore
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- Опубліковано 29 чер 2024
- GENERIC GREETINGS and welcome to an episode that turned out to be pure chaos and rambling rants. But considering we're talking about maybe the worst ship ever i feel like it was justified. The Cylon Basestar from the RDM version of BSG is big, intimidating and made of gods darned meat while being unable to do much more than get clowned on and humiliated.
So settle in and enjoy as SCI and Steve laugh our way through this one.
And if you'd like to support SCI and get access to all the things we had to cut for youtube and to keep the runtime down check out our patreon and buy me a coffee, or feed Steve!
/ scienceinsanity
0:00 Intro
2:00 History and Design
11:45 Stats and Capability
23:35 HERESY
29:52 Battle Strategies
38:38 Final Verdict - Розваги
Wait...wait, I just had a thought. The bow of every Battlestar is informally known as the "alligator head" and the Cylons ever so helpfully started making their ships out of meat.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is called 'knowing your role.'
Sometimes my comments section really does hide the ocasional gem. This got a solid chuckle from good'ol SCI
*deathroll time*
Yeah, the author was pretty obvious.
You need to keep in mind that the base ship was intended as a first strike, knock them out of the fight, type of ship. It wasn't really supposed to be a ship to ship class battleship. It was to use surprise, jump in, hack the computers of any battlestars or fighters it encountered and then nuke them. It was a giant aircraft carrier without the benefit of having support ships because the Cyclons put all their eggs in the "We can nuke them before they can do anything" basket and to be fair, it nearly worked.
also to be fair in the mini-series that single basestar galactica has to get the refugee fleet past is showsn to be a very formidable and scary enemy. it just looks so ALIEN it it casually pelts the Galactica with a slow stream of missiles which slowly turns into a drizzle.
The Cylon strategy seemed to be the equivalent of North Korea's, but offensively oriented. Totally neglect your actual warfighting power (the NK Army is in a sorry state, as is their navy, and would probably be crushed in a shooting war) and put all your resources into WMDs. Because if you can build and maintain an advantage in nuclear first strike capabilities, while at the same time being able to mitigate any defenses your opponent has against them, conventional forces don't really matter. But it's an all or nothing, audacious approach; you either win immediately or you get your shit pushed in
They are just basically large Strategic Bombers meant to penetrate deep into enemy territory and nuke strategic targets. Despite there weakness they worked as intended with great success. The Cylons just did not count on a Battlestar escaping and having to conduct a prolonged pursuit and dealing with a very capable commander and his well trained forces.
@@cane6074 Exactly. They weren't meant to slug it out, because the cylons correctly concluded that wouldn't work. Besides, they had effectively become immortal, so even losing a baseship means what, exactly? As long as the resurrection ship is working death becomes just another experience to be learned from, Sharon outright told Starbuck this in Scar. I think a lot of people oversimplify the situation watching the show as just a series of big space battles between roughly equal adversaries. Far from it, the Cylons didn't even have to win to win. The only reason they lost in the end was because they, for bizarre religious reasons, decided to throw away their advantages and try to literally become their enemies. Compare that to The Matrix where the machines stayed true to what they were and focused on optimization, and they won
@@jakeg3733 The Cylons were basically waging nuclear war on an interstellar scale, the intent in nuclear war is to destroy the enemies ability to attack or retaliate. Your own forces may suffer heavy causalities in the process, but if you succeed in what was just stated, you have won and they did so in that regard. Though the basestars were still a major threat to the Colonials, they were not designed to be battleships. Strategic Bombers can be repurposed for a verity of roles, but the cant do everything. That was the flaw of their design and Cylon strategy more broadly, it put to much emphasis on surprise and overwhelming force, their military was to narrowly designed towards a singular mission.
The only reason the basestars relied entirely on missiles and fighters is so we could have beauty shots of Galactica jumping away from swarms at the last second.
the Battlestars use ballistic railguns with no computer aiming. The Basestars use 100% AI targetting and cannot aim manually.
@@SantomPh the cylon are an ai making the guns be able to fire manually is a very bad decision and allow for your enemy to use the guns
The quote from the guy who designed the bob semple is just the best. After being laughed at by everyone, he turned around and said "I don't see you doing anything better."
And he was correct, as NZ never built another tank.
Lets call it bob semple fallacy, the assumption that doing something is always better than doing nothing.
@@robertkalinic335To be fair, the bob semple is better than nothing.
I mean, if you got in a war, would you rather have a bob sample or no tank at all.
It not like new-zeland had industry to make actual tank, sometimes you got to do with what you have.
@@Mastercheap You mean overburdened agricultural tractor with brens strapped to it?
Spread those guns to like four cars, put some armor plates to cover most exposed parts and thats pretty much what u can do about that.
@@robertkalinic335 To be fair to the bob sample, it was supposed to have a canon in the turret, so it would probably have been at least somewhat better than a car with a machine gun and some armor plates on it.
I also, I don’t know how many car their was in new-Zealand or wether or not they had any car industry, but I don’t think they had enough to respond to a hypothetical invasion by japan and any industry they could have would be annihilated pretty fast.
They didn’t have the industry to make something decent, I don’t think they have anyone that know how to make tank, whatever they could come up with would have been a piece of junk.
It may be a piece of junk, but I think it would be better than nothing, if barely.
At least it’s better than some of the idea that the old guard had in Britain, which isn’t saying much, but credit where credit is due. Plus, it probably could get is a somewhat good suppressing fire, it got three machines gun in the front after all.
(Also, wow, you answered fast)
I think the best way to describe the Cylon Basestar is Hyper Specialized.
It was ment to do One Thing And did it very well but when asked to anything else it failed miserably.
Reminds me of the tiger tank in world war 2. Designed exclusively for breakthrough engagements with superior allied armor that was misused severely in almost every battle it historically fought.
Not really. Modern carriers are just as specialized, but they have escorts that protect them while they’re doing their job. If the Sylans had the equivalent of a carrier strike group, they’d have ended humanity like nothing.
@@kokofan50 Computers/AIs, they did the math that would present the best solution using the least amount of resources. The whole plan was based on disarming their opponents and surprising them. This was covered in the first 10 minutes. If you want to play sci-fi what if, we could go the other way - If the colonials had better intelligence services the toasters would never have had a chance in the first place, regardless. Our CIA would have been able to steal all info and destabilize all 12 colonies without any effort at all. Facial recognition alone would have made it impossible for the infiltrators to work as they did.
@@liwojenkins intelligence failures happen, including very big ones. It’s even more difficult because you can’t infiltrate and have to rely on just signals intelligence in this case.
Not being understanding even the most basic fleet doctrine with centuries of experience and advanced AI simulations breaks the emersion.
@@kokofan50 this is a sci-fi universe, where the cylon‘s have precision jump capabilities. The Basestar would jump in at the edge of the system, we’ll outside colonial defense range and dispatch heavy Raiders to do the actual work
The cylon’s have the ability to nuke any city on any one of the colonies without warning by simply sending in heavy Raiders loaded with nukes to jump in atmosphere and detonate. Resurrection technology doesn’t even make it a suicide mission….. the Cylons could wipe out the colonies in an afternoon.
Their entire Rules of Engagement were sorted around a sneak attack to cause complete anihilation. IT WORKED. almost completely.
Anything elso you said (very good analisis) is valid just there wasn't supposed to be any more humans.
They didn't adapt to the new scenario and thats is totally normal too.
They weren't aiming to a war, just a very succesful genocide. That's Brother Cavill plan, and was a good plan, evil and monstrous yes, but efficient plan.
Then, as good story writting, the Ragnar Station storm affected they meat suits, which was unaccounted for. Then their supperiority was so massive, that the hunt for the galáctica was on, and they didn't consider an upgrade of their ENTIRE fleet to destroy ONE SINGLE outdated battlestar. Wich is logical too.
Their Strategic analisis was perfect. Their Tactical one wasn't.
Except that the whole idea of 'we have a grand plan and if everything works as intended then nothing wrong will happen' is a notoriously bad idea to have. If more ships were able to deal with the virus like the Pegasus did, then the Cylons would have been in a terrible spot.
Basestars actually aren’t bad ships. They’re just used wrong. They’re super carriers. Carriers always fight with escorts. With couple equivalents to heavy cruisers and destroyers, Basestars would have completely flattened a battle star, which is a hybrid of a heavy cruiser and carrier.
Could you imagine the hybrids trying to command a battle group.
@@Dularr oh by the gods that would be hilarious
Soooo, if the Base Star had a supporting flert, it would flatten a Battlestar. Well, yeah. No capital ship is designed to fight alone. Supercarriers of the oceangoing navies never go out alone, they are slways the center of a group of cruisers and destroyers. And, if the carrier is Russian, an oceangoing tugboat to haul the carrier back to pirt when it breaks down.
That said, I was never able to get enthused about the remade series, so I don't know how badly the ships were nerfed in the name of drama. Certainly the new Battlestar designs had blind spots big enough to hide the original Baltar's ginormous ego.
In defense of the baseship, the one time Galactica engaged one 1v1, Galactica was loosing (S2E1 Scattered) The base ships were intended to hit colonials outside of cannon range with missiles, nukes and swarms of FTL capable fighters also armed with nukes. We also only see limited Cylon infrastructure; just the colony and a few small bases. Having a fleet of smaller (than modern battlestars), faster, self repairing, maybe self building, glass cannons make sense. They simply couldn’t keep up with colonial shipbuilding. So they build these ships with advanced FTLs to jump in and take out as much colonial infrastructure/docked ships as possible, jump out and then worry about outmaneuvering and taking out the rest of the colonial fleet over time. The virus hack just gave them the ultimate trump card. Also, the cylons seemed to forget to use nukes when chasing Galactica which I chuck up to plot reasons, cylon arrogance or maybe “God” for in show purposes. That being said… having to fight a battlegroup of Mercury class with nothing but Basestars sounds like a nightmare, the resurrection ship would be very busy that day 😂
Battlestar Galactica is a wonderful, sci-fi property, but it makes no sense technologically.
We can except that the colonies regressed technologically, because they didn’t want the silence to hack them, but the cylon’s lack of cannons is there simply so the BSG Can use its flack to shoot down missiles and take less damage….. even a few decent hits with cannons like the mercury class mounts would add up very quickly and Galactica wouldn’t be in the fight for very long. As for the giant elephant in the room that nobody is acknowledging, the cylon‘s have ultra precise, advanced jump capabilities…. But basically only scratch the surface of actually using them logically. Why shoot missiles in a battlestar when you can just jump a heavy raider with a nuke into the flight pod and blow it up from the inside out?
I think it was two basestars, and they were holding their one. Onw ship got through.
Usually, galactica can hold of two for ten minutes. 😊they had to hold out for 12 minutes.
Honestly, the Galactica did more damage to itself by ramming in the Cylon Colony than the Basestars did to Galactica. In fact, I believe that individually that stabilators, fellow colonials, and the Cyclon Colony did more damage to the Galactica than all the Basestars and its Raiders combined. And the worst part is that the Cylcons did not kill Glactica, it was time (in the form of rust and stress) that killed Galactica.
And to be technical, the Pegauss as well since it was destroyed by the combined fire of Cylon Basestars, but the incompetence of one young Adama and it ramming itself into a Basestars to take out a fleet of Basestars. And talk about pathetic, for the debris from the Pegasus was enough to kill a Basestar.
Nah they did plenty of damage over New Caprica, but that was mostly because of how understaffed Galactica was.
The RDM Basestar has precisely one virtue which may be the reason why the Cylons used it: it's self growing and self repairing, and apparently does so very quickly. Shipyards? Construction crews? Don't need them. Just make a seed or whatever, feed it raw materials, and in short order you'll have a working Basestar. Battle damage? The ship heals itself without crew intervention.
From a logistical point of view, the RDM Basestar is easily and quickly mass produced, likely easier and faster to make than a conventional metal ship. There are components that probably can't be mass produced in this way (guns and missiles for example), but the self growing nature of the Basestar means the Cylon's non-organic industry can focus on making those components rather than whole basestars, which still speeds up production.
The downside of course is that the organic Basestar while fast and easy to mass produce basically sucks at anything else you'd want a Basestar to do compared to an old fashioned metal Basestar.
Also, given what we learn in the later seasons, I'm not sure the organic basestar was designed to be a warship first. I think they were originally designed as comfortable living space for the human model Cylons first, and were only later pressed into being Warships because they were what the Cylons had when the Ones finally convinced the others to destroy the Colonies.
They are more than capable of wiping out the colonies without losing a single BASESTAR in the process… they are super carriers, use them that way. Jump into the outer system half a million km outside colonial weapons range and use your precision jump capability to deploy fighters to jump in and nuke the enemy without ever exposing the Basestar to enemy fire.
"Holy wall of flak blessed be its name."
Flak gang!!
I always wondered why they didn't include large mass drivers in the spike arms. They would be a great anti-ship and orbital bombardment weapon.
Why bother? The 12 colonies are the only other known sentient life in the galaxy, and the Cylons have a massive jump tech advantage over them, they can literally jump nuclear weapons inside individual Battlestars ( not that they did such a thing in the show for obvious reasons)
The cylon’s had no reason to arm the basestars for ship to ship combat, they’re super carriers that were never supposed to engage the enemy directly
@@Matt-yg8ubright but within the four years that take place over the show you think they’d retroactively add a few since their missiles weren’t doing shit to galactica except for new caprica
@@jfernandez7098 well, where is the fun in that :-) if the Cylons were a competent enemy, Galactica would be dead. as depicted, the silence are relatively dysfunctional, led by a diluted madman, and basically just harassing Galactica for the purposes of following them to the promised land.
If the Cylons had been a competent enemy, that wanted Galactica dead, all they would have had to do was stick a nuke on a heavy raider and jump it into a flight pod and kaboom .
I love the utterly alien and non human organic design of the Modern Basestar. It never felt like anything Humans would make. Unfortunately it seems much like The Borg they made the CYLONS so scary right off the bat that the writers had to essentially make them StoooPID retroactively so humanity had any chance of victory or even survival in subsequent appearances. The Episode 30 minutes really shows the CYLONS simply wearing the humans down with constant non stop persuit, as machines don’t sleep and they have a massive fleet (we don’t obviously). I think that’s part of the problem with how they idiotically sacrificed the Pegasus when it should have been the Galactica doing the last stand.
The Basestar is an immensely powerful vessel, and used competently, could easily leverage the cylon‘s command of jump technology to wipe the floor with the colonies, but that wouldn’t be very fun I would it :-)
It’s a heavy battle carrier, the thing is armed to bombard a planet with nukes …. And carries thousands of nuclear armed precision jump capable fighter craft. This thing could jump into a star system 500,000 km outside the range of the colonials defenses… and deploy fighters, then jump to the other side of the star system if the colonials got anywhere near weapons range.
The Basestar is not intended to EVER engage a Battlestar in direct combat… and if this wasn’t a TV show where the show runners needed to put both vessels on the screen at the same time… they never would ever directly engage one another.
In a realistic scenario, someone in CIC would yell DRADIS contact… A blip would appear at the extreme range of sensors and five seconds later, 200 Raiders would jump in, in an encircling formation, fire their nukes and jump back out before the first viper made it off the launch rails.
Or worse….. the writers were honest about the massive tech disparity here, the Basestar jumps in and five seconds later, a single heavy raider jumps into the port flight pod and explodes ripping the whole ship in half.
The cylon’s never had to infiltrate the colonies to disable their defenses to kill them, they outmatched them to such a ludicrous degree that they could simply avoid the colonials defenses entirely, and didn’t need to nuke them from orbit, they could’ve done it directly and skipped putting the Basestars in weapons range of those defenses in the first place.
IIRC the hacking anti-missile doctrine was excellent - against the modernized colonial fleet. It was utterly useless against mothballed, retired, or museum-level equipment (hence why the Galactica was able to survive).
Without the backdoor in the CNP programm it would also have been useless against the modern colonial fleet.
They move to fast and not waiting unit the Battlestar were beyond working order cylon 50-100years then destroyed them humanity
I was thinking at the controversy of the Cylon Basestar configuration when it turns to that double Y from the inverted for planetary atmosphere entry actually makes sense. Looking at the top and bottom of the basestar they are extremely smooth and how it's rounded till to does a slight flair at the edges. You look at a modern-day shuttle or the older command pods of the Apollo missions and such you see that similar concept. The bottom is very smooth and rounded designed to absorb and reduce frictional heat and drag. Now I get this thing isn't ariel dynamic by any definition but, using the bottom hard surface to absorb the heat and friction and dissipating it through absorbing through say circulatory system this thing probably has to transfer to the top hard surface to vent out. Preventing excess heat from building up and causing munitions from cooking off or fuel from catching fire. Also, the weapons, while a number of them are at the edge line of each arm, the ordinance tends to be set at an angle when being deployed. Like the magazine or the loaders are closer to the "biceps" the inner arms of each arm. Indicating they are further from this shell and providing so level of protection from thermal build up. And while the inverted side is lined up to the to the other side it can still use the main body to act as a drag as the drive for each basetar might not work as well in atmosphere compared to space. Not much is known about the propulsion system of Cylon basestars, but because it's assumed it's based on gravity inertial concept then it would more than likely it might not be able to work in atmosphere as well given it's got to fight a lot of gravity. And a decent into atmosphere would be very difficult to compensate with additional powerful propulsion systems. But offset the entry with unusual but very high reinforced shell capable of absorbing that heat with the second inline smooth surface to pull in turbulence and act as a drogue shut on the way down then yeah that might take off the stress of the propulsion system. Getting off world is slightly easier, just increase the output and slowly lift up and out of the atmosphere. Not fighitng friction on the way up as much as you are going down.
The fact humans stopped using guided missiles means the their missile defense system worked. The fact the Cylones didn’t have escorts or even just a fighter screen to intercept dump missiles is is inexcusable however.
they have Raiders as a fighter screen. However the Colonials usually distracted the Raiders before striking Basestars. The Hub (the final base) had point defenses as well as fighter wings, which is why Adama commanded the Deadalous maneuver to close the distance.
@@SantomPh the robots with a hive mind got distracted by something. No wonder the lost.
In the first episode, Starbuck remarks that the loss of 30~40 (can't remember which off the top of my head) Battlestars is "almost a QUARTER of the fleet"!!!!!!
-Theyre made of meat.
-What?
-They. Are made. Of meat.
-Are you sure?
-Oh yes. We've probed them very thoroughly and they're meat ALL the way THROUGH!
Who wants to talk to meat?
@@derekburge5294 Ever talked to a person...?
@@Sephiroth144 It's from a short film adapted from a novella. Search for 'They're Made of Meat.'
@@derekburge5294 So same shit, different channel...
What's this starwars now
Love the BSG lore videos! Are you planning to do a lore video on the humanoid Cylons, their inception and their grand plan to wipe out the Colonies (and the whole infiltration stuff that happened as part of that)? That might be a fun topic to touch on, too!
Keep up the great work, looking forward to the next lore video! Greetings from Germany!
the Basestar combines the concept of a Fleetcarrier with a Missile Cruiser. Operational the concept makes far more sense than nearly any Capital ship in Star Wars. And any ship hit by a nuke is history, regardless how capital it is.
One mor point, in space Basestar simply don't need a carrier escort because the lomgrange AAW is already included and without a need for ASW their is no need for escorts
Obviusly their was a lot of bad writing about these ships.
Precisely. The Cylons have precision jump capability… The Basestar should never be on the same side of a solar system as the enemy.
Galactica took two nukes in its first battle and eats several nukes later on. Pegasus survived a volley of nukes and only lost FTL (tby Peggys ftl was made of tin, you could know it out with an airsoft gun)
Remember that the cylons have a plan, what they lacked was a contingency.
👌😎👍Very cool and very nicely greatly well done and informatively explained and executed in every detail way shape and format provided on the Cylon Basestars and various other vessels of the Newer more darker version of the Battlestar Galactica series, A job very wonderfully well done indeed Sir's!.
Think more like WW1. Battleships were floating hotels going to war.
The Cylon Basestars were floating VR movie theaters going to war.
I don’t know if they touch on this in the video, but if they don’t, this joke only makes sense to people who remember a VERY specific scene LMAO.
One of the massive glaring holes I always thought with BSG was how they designed their foot soldiers to be immune to most small arms the Colonials have, but didn't do the same to their large ships. They clearly had the capability and intelligence to make counter what the Colonials had and decided to instead hope that the virus would do all of their work for them.
If, for whatever reason, the virus did not work as intended, such as if the Colonials were able to counter it in time, they probably would have gotten slaughtered.
What would be the point of armoring a basestar against a battlestars guns?
The cylon‘s have a fleet of organic ships that can repair themselves at the cost of being squishy… adding armor, takes away one of their greatest capabilities.
Bass. Stars don’t need to engage battle stars in combat, there’s no reason or need to do so. They’re super carriers, armed with hundreds of precision jump capable nuclear armed fighters… we don’t armor aircraft carriers against battleships because aircraft carriers never engage battleships directly, that’s what their fighter wings are for.
I always just assume the silence were vindictive, and they wanted the colonials to be able to look up and see the giant base stars in the sky before they were nuked, otherwise, there was no reason to jump into orbit a nuke them …. Just send heavy raiders to jump in from three systems over and never expose the Basestars to enemy fire.
Basestars don’t need to be heavily armored, because if this wasn’t a television show, they’d never go in to direct combat with anyone… ever.
The Cylone Basestar is the only ship in sci-fi that can 69 itself....I'm jelly.
Read John Ringo’s “Troy Rising” series for some good space battles. Also Craig Alanson’s “Expeditionary Force” series.
Colonial engineers
500 missile tunes?
Alright let's refit our fleet with 501 PDC's
So I've been thinking. The basestar didn't need turrets because they had raiders doing the job of turrets. Now flak walls they should have but point defence would be taken care of by the raiders. Send 3/4 of them at the fleet and keep 1/4 for ship defence from missiles and your good. And as AI they would be very good at shooting down missiles. Not a real defense of the basestar but it makes sense from the cylon perspective.
Basestars should never be on the same side of a solar system as an enemy combatant, that’s what the Raiders are for.
Basestars are super carriers, armed with nuclear capable precision jump fighters. They don’t have to get anywhere near the combat zone, The Raiders can jump from a solar system away and still hit their targets and come back
The Original series Base Star was so much more practical in design and esthetics .
I had always seen this Cylon Basestar as being a first strike ship..
it was designed to zip in fast, exploit programming flaws they set up, and wipe everything out. Why survive a thugfest firefight when you can just wipe everyone out with missile hits and a nightmarish number of fighters.
On the downside.. if a warship does survive the first strike and wasn't upgraded with the new tech.. those Cylon ships were boned.
Was it a bad plan? yes
Was it a bad ship? yes
Was it poorly designed? no.. as a first strike/wipe everything out ship it was fine. spitting out 220 nuclear missiles as they spew out hundreds of fighters is overwhelming. unfortunately, they did not plan on how f'in badass of a commander Adama was
the Cylons' biggest advantage is their ground troops and missile batteries. They stayed away from fighting the Colonials head on for 50 years because the Battlestars would tear through them in a head to head contest. After their infiltration of humanity and the CNP backdoor the humans lost their best advantage. The fight of two Basestars with the Pegasus and Galactica was a no contest without the Raiders supporting the Basestars. Even an old ship like the Galactica was ripping holes and tearing the arms off of the Basestars.
The survivors in the end turned their disadvantage into advantage by leveling up their Viper fighters and using small strikes to destroy the Cylon Resurrection ship and later the Hub.
Kinetic weapons are essential because Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!
Neither version of Battlestar Galactica really stands up well to close examination.
The double-saucer BaseStar in the original series was well designed as a ship for a civilization with extremely limited tactical acumen but overwhelming industrial might and a complete insensitivity to casualties. It was big, tough, and able to react to attacks from any direction.
In the reboot, neither version of the BaseStar was really good. In the First Cylon War, the BaseStars required too many resources to build and weren't commandingly better than the Battlestars the 13 Colonies could field, and the Cylons didn't actually have massively superior industry, so they were losing the war of attrition.
In the Second Cylon War, they designed the BaseStar to be easily mass produced so they wouldn't lose the war of attrition, has resurrection tech so they could be completely insensitive to casualties, had a plan to absolutely gut their enemies in the first strike so there wouldn't even be a war of attrition, and they still screwed up. They lost resurrection tech, they had a civil war so their massive numbers were turned against them, and their religious obsession with destroying humanity sooner than instantly forced them to keep the ragtag fugitive fleet under high alert by constantly harassing them. Should have waited for them to settle down and then did another genocide strike with new, better designed ships. By then they new their BaseStars weren't up to the job of finishing off humanity.
a robotic race losing an industrial race is a bit strange
I love that series, I have it all on DVD. But at the same time, there are so many ridiculous things about it which makes it easy to criticize. The Cylon base ships, for example. No guns, only fighters and missiles, which make it cannon fodder to a battlestar.
Floating all inclusive resorts going to war.
The same way an Aircraft Carrier is cannon fodder for a Destroyer right?
Outside of the need to put both combatants on the screen at the same time to make this an enjoyable television show, the BSG probably would not have actually laid eyes on a Basestar…. She would have been destroyed by its air wing long before she ever got into gun range.
The cylon’s are operating a vast fleet of super carriers, each equipped with hundreds of precision jump capable starfighters armed with nuclear weapons. The only warning Galactica would have had is someone in the CIC yelling “DRADIS contact” five seconds before 100 Raiders jumped in out of nowhere and fired nuclear weapons at it from point blank range….. and that’s if the Cylons are feeling charitable. if they’re not, they just sent a heavy raider to jump directly into the flight pod and blow the ship up from the inside out.
@Matt-yg8ub no it is because the show runner wanted Christian theme
@Matt-yg8ub no it is because the show runner wanted Christian theme
also what a world that we live in that windows millennium edition has been forgotten
So, I have to ask. Who do you put money on in a fight between Adama and Cain? Because honestly, I think Adama would have found a completely insane way to put the pain on the Pegasus.
Micro jump onto the 6 o'clock low position of the Pegasus where their firepower is limited and ours can be brought to bare for maximum effect, hammer their engines until they are scrap metal and they physically cannot maneuver, work over the rest of the ship till they tap out
The other thing to remember is that the cylons , as I remember it, basestar you are talking about had a VERY large number of cylon star fighters attached directly to the outside of the hull. Capable of performing a swarm launch and attack. Look carefully and you'll see it.
If its meat , will it bbq?
Would you eat it?
@@txlyons2937 Hell yeah. Cylons are not human, so its not possibly cannibalism.
For that matter, #6 as an appatizer.
@@roberthullock3568 I thought 6 would be dessert.
@@roberthullock3568better have holly water
@@TempoLOOKING You mean holy water? i actually prefer mesquite for doing BBQ
😒 wouldn't be a fair assumption to say that the cylons would have been more effective at trying to fix the Battlestar as opposed to destroy it
The double-Tri Basestars are carrier/missile cruisers; very much standoff, glass cannon ships. And lest we forget, a fleet of these decimated 12 planetary populations in less than a day; yes, the CNP virus made the Colonial Fleet inert for the engagement, but they still were destroyed in that short timeframe as well. And the few times they got in fight with the Pegasus and/or Galactica, (as opposed to the Colonials running), it wasn't a slamdunk for the Colonials: the only BS lost during the Resurrection Ship strike was double teamed; no BSs were lost when the Pegasus went after the Raptor (despite the Pegasus getting nuked and otherwise slapped around); New Cap did lose 3 Basestars, though at a cost of the stronger of the remaining Battlestars; and the attack at the Ionia Nebula would've likely finished off the fleet is the Raider doggie hadn't "smelled" his missing person.
Sure, should there have been more of a mix in the fleet? Probably- but given the fleet was primarily built for a first and total strike, the Double-Tris did their job remarkably well.
Your review is based on the Cylons forgetting that 'no plan survives contact with the enemy'. Sure, with how well things went for them, the basestars would good enough, but they should not have planned for that.
@@cp1cupcake if this wasn’t a TV show where we needed to see the Basestars and the BSG on the screen at the same time…we wouldn’t. These ships aren’t designed to slug it out, they are super carriers designed to sit far far far away and send their jump capable fighters out to do all the fighting for them. In a realistic scenario, the colonies would never have laid eyes on a modern Basestar…… they would have been nuked by heavy Raiders and died without ever knowing what it’s mothership looked like.😊
Had it not been for the CNP, the colonies would still have been nuked, but the colonial fleet would've 1v1 them into oblivion, don't think Jupiter class ships, but Mercury and larger with the industrial capabilities to build vipers and raptors🤷♂️
This is like Lt Commander Data coming up with a plan based off of simulations, efficiency, and min maxing. Then once in battle he plays everything perfectly... and gets his synthetic a$$ handed to him by a master strategist who's like, nah bro, I'm going to find and exploit every weakness in your perfect defenses. And succeeds at it.
It's never stated explicitly in the show, but every battle seems to suggest that the basestars aren't really built to go toe-to-toe with the colonial fleet. They have no point defense weapons (except for The Colony) and seemed to be designed only to bombard disabled targets with missiles.
little late to the party but id like to add that keeping all the nukes and other missiles away from the bulk of the ship is a good idea. in the event of a chain detonation, you only lose a spoke, not the whole basestar. it will hurt like heck, but you could theoretically limp to saftey. no secondary weapons and all those raiders tho.......
Just came over from your RC channel. Sci-Fi?! * pulls up a chair *
Minor point of order: the cylons were definitely planning on destroying 100% of the colonial fleet in the initial attack. As it stands, Pegasus only survived by pure dumb luck, and Galactica survived by a combination literal divine intervention and the inertia of William Adama's balls. That they never actually planned to fight a real war isn't really a flaw in their reasoning considering the only thing that kept them from absolute total victory was that ONE weird battlestar that just positively refused to die no matter how many times they boarded/sabotaged/hacked/nuked it.
The RDM stars weren't designed to fight wars. They were designed for what would come after.
Personally, these basestars look like caltropes. :D
Anyways, the reason why humanoid Cylons used concurrent voting even for micromanaging military tactics was because that's what the Final Fives did when they were planning a long exodus from the 13th colony, Earth.
Cylon basestars were built with the notion in mind that Pearl Harbor strikes would leave them uncontested, not drawn out battles of attrition.
Feels like they designed the ship purely for planetary bombardment and mop-up operations once the virus hit. After they failed to get every last ship, they were stuck with a fleet that was mostly useless against their only remaining enemy and the only reason Galactica didn't pick off their ships one by one is a lack of ammo and a fleet to guard.
The Base Star is Brilliant! If you have ever played a table top fleet game you will know being able to fire in all directions is king. It is a MASSIVE MASSIVE MASSIVE advantage to fire in all directions when your opponent can only fire in 3. The only reason that humans win is plot armor.
Dude, love your channel. I grew up playing Battletech/Mechwarrior in the 90s (still love it), and when I found the RDM:BSG I was hooked. I've spent the past decade rewatching it once or twice a year, digging into the sparse lore available outside the show, and thinking on some of the mysteries; I'd like to point out a few things about Baseships and Cylons in general that might make them a bit less ridiculous. Bit of a rant but it all ties into their shitty-ass ship designs in the end
First, to say that the Cylons shot themselves in the dick is a massive understatement. As machines they had a massive advantage, and had they been agnostic and played on those advantages the war would have been over (as in humans wiped out) in far less than 12 years. BUT they just happened to be religious fanatics, and a core tenet of that religion seems to be that the human form is sacred and they should try to emulate it. Several humanoid models say that they believe it isn't so much about wiping out humanity from raw hatred, it's about _replacing_ us
So, instead of going the route the machines took in The Matrix, capitalizing on the mutability of their physical form to create ever more efficient killing machines, they did bizarre and grotesque experiments on humans seeking to emulate us. We can see from the game (Deadlock, which I _do_ consider at least partly canon) that by year 10 or so they had a vast understanding of human consciousness and neurology, far better than we do. They were able to digitalize a human mind and combine it with others, and with synthetic AI minds, which probably lead to the hybrids
Anyway, pivoting towards becoming instead of destroying humans they eliminated their advantages in mass-manufacturing and raw killing power. They may have had humanity on the ropes when the treaty was signed but they went off into the middle of fucking nowhere and decommissioned their old purely mechanical tech to replace it with the bizarre biomechanical crap we see in the show. They had probably run simulations on how a war would go down the second time around and realized that with a united humanity having had 40 years to prepare and tech up for a fight, there were two possibilities: First, a slogging deathmatch that would take forever and even then might not lead to conclusive victory. Option two was what we see; subversion.
These Baseships were never designed for a straight fight, they are more like mobile EWar platforms with huge fighter wings and nuclear weapon delivery systems. Cavil even says in "The Plan", _there were never supposed to be any survivors_ . By this time they no longer had the industrial capacity to crank out old school warships, because remember they are as much biological as mechanical, they'd have to be grown in some form. The core principles of their technology had changed completely in the past 40 years. So when their (ballsy, but arrogant and stupid) plan failed they had to make do with as you say, maybe the worst ship ever designed
TL;DR These ships were never actually supposed to fight in more than a very limited sense. Mopping up stragglers
I gotta admit when I took a glance at the first photo of the Cylon basestar I thought it was the SOLG from Ace Combat 5
Btw the part about the cylons advancing so far that they created government and bureaucracy. I just started dying. The mental image of that just absolutely killed me. 😂
I think the reason why Cylons don’t put a lot of emphasis on survivability is simply because they assumed they would always be able to resurrect.
Couple of years of constant warfare and what killed galatica was lack of maintenance to her FTL and extended hits taken to the superstructure that a few months in dock would have fixed.
I like the idea that was put out by the YT channel Spacedock that the under lining story of the "dying leader" leading humanity to it's new home and had a wasting disease and wouldn't survive to see the new home was the Galactica really making her a character
@@trekkieraccoon3343 Not gonna lie when galacticas back broke I thought I was gonna cry.
@@trekkieraccoon3343 Still disagree with that one; IMnsHO, it was Roslin... But the Galactica (like all good hero ships) are a character in their show.
Also, I'd say at least a year to fix the damage to Galactica; even before the final jump (or heck, before the ramming), the old girl was really needing some serious work done.
to be honest. the Cylons should have stayed with the tried and tested original Basestar from the 70's series.
an armored, well armed, proper battlecarrier that could actually SHOOT BACK!
Missiles, Actual Guns both kinetic and energy and scads of Raiders housed in isolated, self contained Hangars. SIX of them!
recessed into that stacked dinner plate hull that a direct shot would be unlikely.
Galactica, like so many other Battlestars, are so heavily armored that they could face tank the modern Basestar and just drive straight through it!
the Cylons weren't entirely sure their Hail Mary Pearl Harbor style surprise attack would even work, yet they made utterly NO provision for a second wave attack force of more conventional ships that actually could tank a Battlestar and go toe to toe with it in a stand up fight?????
I don't fault the Cylons for this SNAFU, this tactical and strategic Typhoon level blunder falls entirely upon the writers of the story where it rightfully belongs.
the writers failed hilariously to understand that no matter how thoroughly you glass a planet with nukes, there WILL always be survivors to continue the fight.
while their hail mary bolt from the blue first strike was wildly successful, the Cylons now had planets full of seriously pissed off survivors repairing what they needed and going after those bloody Toasters for some righteously serious unholy Payback!
the TV series would not have gone anything like it actually did as aired, because humanity would have risen up again and utterly ROFLStomped the Toasters back into the stone age.
They are just basically large Strategic Bombers meant to penetrate deep into enemy territory and nuke strategic targets. Despite there weakness they worked as intended with great success. The Cylons just did not count on a Battlestar escaping and having to conduct a prolonged pursuit and dealing with a very capable commander and his well trained forces.
Regardless of the initial intention of the Basestar, when deployed, each vessel was, in fact, an Exopheric Battle Station. Instead of deploying these vessels as a mobile fortress with its unique jump drive that could launch an overwhelming barrage of missiles and then 'hot' jump before being engaged with fighters, acting as a screen when or if pursued, it was instead used as a semi-static pocket battleship with the combat capability of a semi-armored weaponized satelight, who's only saving grave was an EMP weapon that was quickly countered by not arming warheads from the opposing forces?!
The Donnager kinda got the Worf treatment, in that seeing it destroyed was meant to show how strong the op-for was, but in doing so it kinda made it look weak after Season 1. The Donnager really was a beast, and to be fair it took out four out of six of the Amun-Ra stealth ships after they got the jump on her, which were the exact kind of ambush missions they were designed for.
In 12:55 you got your measurements wrong. I checked it and it looks to me that you got your measurements from the Battlestar wiki.
But there it doesn't specify the length of the ship, only the width and height.
The actual measurements of the Modern Basestar are:
Length: ~1986m
Width: ~1080m
Height: ~256m
Other ship's lengths for reference:
OG Basestar: ~1750m
Pegasus: ~1789m
Galactica: ~1414m
So while it is the longest it still probably has the least displacement of the ships listed above.
Also you missed another middle step of the evolution of basestars:
1st Variant: OG Basestar
2nd Variant: Blood and Chrome Basestar
3rd Variant: Razor (Guardian) Basestar
4th Variant: Modern Basestar.
I noticed because the 2nd variant is my favorite and it wasn't listed, depsite being the perfect middleground from the OG Basestar and the modern, which is basically the OG Basestar fused with the tandem (but not opposed) y configuration. Measuring an estimate of +3000m long (I modelled it for a game so had to do a lot of research on it because there's very scarce info about it). Fucking sick design dare I say.
Cool video otherwise, enjoyed watching.
Just realized what a text wall I just wrote, but it was worth it to give some visibility to my fave BSG ship, followed closely by the Battlestar Valkyrie.
As a carrier and missile bombardment ship, it's superb, but when you're facing battlestars you really do need to bring something that can take punches and give them back in a manner minimally obstructed by CIWS. Had the Cylons commissioned a few battleships to get in close for slugfests and been less foddery at times, they could have won. Even if a Jupiter class won't go quietly.
I kind of get the vibe that part of your complaint is a bit like saying the Yorktown is shit because it rarely took out any kind of ships and should have been going in broadsides against the Yamato.
Yep…. Completely ignores that it’s a BASEstar…. Not a BATTLEstar….. it’s a carrier…. It carry’s fighters to do the fighting for it
If you were redesign the cylinder base stars but keep star style design what would you do add rail guns across top and bottom, similar flack guns to Galactica, or something?
Why? Who exactly are you shooting at? Basestars are super carriers armed with hundreds of precision jump fighters, they should stay far far away from the battle zone and send the Raiders out to do all of their fighting for them. If you’re in a position to use railguns on the enemy, you’ve already fucked up.
This is literally a Berk class destroyer with regenerative abilities verse a queen Elizabeth super dreadnought with flak and pdc’s for days
And the destroyer should win that fight every day and twice on Sunday.
Love the content of your videos, but I have a quick question: Do you... use spellcheck? Ever? I keep seeing typos in your videos, both title and video itself.
Please be patient. There's nothing wrong with me I'm just really stupid.
@@scienceinsanity6927 Just wanted to check, nothing more. I'm the kind of person where spelling errors screech at me, so I just had to mention it once.
Once is enough. I won't bring it up again.
Again, I enjoy the content nonetheless, and it doesn't take away from that enjoyment. Keep doing what you enjoy, RC.
The Base Stars were perfectly designed for the Cylon's needs. They were designed to take advantage of their superior FTL by jumping in and delivering a massive first strike and jumping out before. The Colonies had superior numbers and resources Once it became a war of attraction the Cylons would have already lost.The Basestar's design was perfectly suited for "the plan"
The Cylon were herding the colonial fleet
The main problem is the Cylons are machines. These things don't look like something a machine would design. Machine designs would be totally utilitarian.
Like the Borg using cubes as ships vs the way star fleet makes ship.
It takes 4 base stars to take out 1 40 year old battle star the Galactica proving once and for all how powerful battle star are
If the Cylons have an inertial/gravity drive, couldn't they progress that into an Abucierre-like warp drive? Might make a nice contrast to the Colonies' space folding/jump. Actually, the Colonies seem to have artificial gravity so they could do it too...
It makes perfect sense for what it was designed for. Jump in, disable defenses, then nuke all the planets before thousands of ships could start running. Fighters would take care of any smaller targets. Mob any still functional warships with overwhelming numbers. Then mop up the scattered civilian survivors who'd have nobody left to protect them.
The flaw in the Cylon plan is that they assumed the few human warships not disabled would stand and fight to protect the colonies... as they had in the first Cylon war. The only large-scale modern warfare the Cylons had any experience was that and recent Colonial wars based around static strategic targets like civilian cities. They never considered that the humans would act differently if all those static targets were already destroyed. A perfectly executed plan that failed because of one basic oversight. How very fitting for BSG, where there was such focus on people doing what they believed best. Flawed logic, lack of information, forgetfulness, and all.
I'd also like to note... the Cylons knew full well that a few of them would get blown up during the attack due to it's complete lack of self-defense. They didn't care though, because why would they? They're immortal. It was an unpleasant inconvenience at worse.
Just keep a few of the old "dinner-plate" base stars around with upgraded weapons/propulsion incase you need to get into a slugfest.
"They get bodied every time they show up!"
Yeah about that....what happened to the 12 colonies?
Not every time they showed up.
Slowly. Ever so slowly. Steve is being assimilated into the nerd herd.
I own this series and have watched it a few times and never realized the basestars don't have defensive guns. I'm guessing because the missiles look more cinematic when they hit the Galactica, but still, not including PDC's was an incredibly dumb decision.
Of course, the Cylons weren't planning on the Colonials fighting back- not to mention, the Battlestars didn't really have (significant) missile capacity, so what would the PDCs be aiming for? KEW shells?
@@Sephiroth144 Well, as the video points out, what happens if the Colonials somehow survived or had a hidden fleet mothballed somewhere and just launched missiles at them? The Cylons would have been incapable of shooting the missiles down unless they relied entirely on raiders to do it.
Even if they were not expecting to have to fight back, adding a few point defense guns on your ship just seems like something that might come in handy at some point.
@@julius-stark Honestly, the swarms of raider were probably their "PD" plan. Mix that in with resurrection, (i.e., acceptable losses- what losses? Welcome to your new body!), and they were probably fine rolling with it.
And if we think about it, they were devising a military plan, they were devising an extermination plan like they were the Orkin man.
@@julius-stark maybe, but the colonies are literally the only threat the cylon’s are aware of…… if this wasn’t a TV show and we didn’t want to see both ships on the screen at the same time, the cylon’s would almost never need to put a Basestar on the same side of a solar system as a Battlestar. Colonial vipers aren’t jump, capable, cylon Raiders are. The only significant threat that the colonies actually posed to a bass star being operated intelligently, might be a raptor or two that happen to stumble upon it sitting far far, far, far far far far out of the way of any actual live combat because its entire fighter wing is precision jump capable and doesn’t have to be anywhere near their mothership to fight.
@@Matt-yg8ub sure, but even the Cylons were surprised at how well their plan worked. If something went wrong or a handful of battlestars weren't networked like the Pegasus this PDC's would've come in handy.
I mean, I guess that's what the raiders are for, but it still leaves the basestars vulnerable.
They were built as the final solution to humanity. Specifically, the part of humanity with 12 tribes. Goddamn space nazis
Steve has been fed, this pleases me.
Wait if basestars are made of meat, does that mean we can use them to feed Steve?
At least it has spinners.
Basestar vs Pegasus. Get wrecked Toasters!
If those two tri-halves spun we could have made Phalanx jokes about ramming maneuvers.
yeah always thought the basestars were a terrible design: no visible thrusters, vulnerable midsectiont hat bones the entire ship if shot at, all-missile and fighetr armament (when their intended opponents have ships designed to throw out litteral walls of flak no less), only and spindly branches with no clear purpose. really if their hacks failed, the cylon basestars would have been completely slaughtered. No durability, no reliable firepower against its intended targets, crappy mobility, its sole valuable purpose to be a dispenser of cylon raiders and nukes. if those dont work (due to, say, POINT DEFENSE), its harmless. Even mroe insulting is that the cylon HQ itself shows that yes, the cylons KNOW how to make very potent direct fire weapons that can maul a battlestar.
Thank god they had raiders to be actual threats in their stead (seeing as raiders can carry nukes, are FTL capable, and are minds that can come back from death over and over, meaning they learn and become better at their job encounter after encounter)
Yall should do the more reasonable cyclon designs from the battlestar galactica deadlock game.
I designed ships for a pen amd paper rpg called Dark Nova, and we have a macross missle based capital ship... it has thousands....tens of thousands of missiles... if you fired them all... it could bankrupt a planetary economy trying to reload it
I think the cylons used biological ships as a mirror of humanity. Humans are meat beings traveling the stars in metal machines. Cylons are metal machines traveling the stars in organic ships.
Yeah, the cylons had to account for their hacking plan to not work all the time.
Them not having a ship that can screen their basestar/resurrection ships is baffling at best.
I thought in the show there were 120 Battle stars with 40 lost in the first strike before the fleet responds.
All these unguided weapons the battlestar uses wouldn't be nearly as effective in real life, there's a reason pgm's are obsoleting dumb bombs, and why non radar guided AAA basically dissapeared.
Also battlestars have shit gun placements that creates ton's of blind spots.
It's a cool looking ship and a nice design, in fact I understand the tactical thinking behind it of course, but the strategy seems half baked. The Basestar works as a carrier and Missile battery for long range work, but it should have and needed escorts who are capable of having gun battles close up. It is a ship which should have been part of duo alongside a ship designed for close quarter gun combat.
i like the design if it was a weapons platform, maybe a destroyer? how up, deploy to assault mode, fire in all directs, "so i started blastin!" lol
and ill counter the stance that the plates were better cause this is still the plate design, all they did was add 3 arms to the top and bottom. however i believe they reduced them in size, which ill agree is stupid overall. and the no def systems outside of fighters is insane to me, purposed all wrong imo
24:59 I mean they can use abundance of raiders to intercept missiles?
A wing of Arachne cruisers from Deadlock would do a better job against the Galactica than all those 'modern' basestars...
It's really silly how after 40 years of time, with a mechanical workforce that doesn't need to sleep and eat and is more durable than human workers, the best Cylons can come up with is a bunch of space GRAD launchers. You even have agents infiltrating Colonial military! Just steal plans of battlestars and make your own! Just make a bigger, improved Arachne class! On the other hand, if the Centurions were really dumb enough to allow human models to put the inhibitor chips in them, well... Maybe Cylons just are that stupid.
Its just a missile/carrier platform. Thats what its for and its damn good at that
Saying the BaseStar is awful is not really accurate... it's more that it was not supported. As a missile artillery and carrier ship it's great, but it needs some support. Just like the Aircraft carriers of modern times, it needs a supporting fleet. If they had some supporting Cruisers/Battlecruisers with kinetic weapons and the BaseStars themselves had point defence guns then they would be fine.
If the Cylons were using it as literally their only capital ship design, it was awful. Just because it would have been great had they used it for something else doesn't change this. It was all they had, and if you only get a single ship model, you make it tactically versatile so it can deal with a variety of situations.
@@richardkenan2891 That is not how that works. A ship design can not be considered awful just because it was misused. Apart from point defence, the design itself is solid.
the Cylons never estimated that anyone would attack the basestar up close. Even in the civil war they only fought using basestars.
Battlecruisers would be to heavy for an escort. However, destroyer/cruise escorts would have created the equivalent of a carrier strike group, and the Cylons would have easily won.
@@kokofan50 I was thinking a Battlecruiser mostly because the thing they are lacking is strong Kinetic Artillery, of course some smaller craft large enough to intercept enemy artillery would also be good.
Space farts.
The move though space by tooting across the stars.
Damn these guys sound exactly like vukkos and feed from Collector Car Feed
Never thought about the basestars like this before
Thx for the video!
Summary: starfish are not menacing and don't work as starship designs.
I think survivability was not a concern for Cylons they could download into another body. Truth be told the Cylons could have destroyed Galatica but I think they did not because of the finale five I mean they had an armada of ships. The first episode shows how the Cylons were just toying with Galactica showing up every 33 minutes to harass them.
1 wiped everyone's memories of the 5
only Cavill remembered the Final 5 with Leoben having odd visions of them and Caprica Six having religious experiences. The 33 minutes thing was the fleet jumping away quickly rather than the Cylons trying to toy with them.
I believe the 33 minutes was more due to the speed of the information reaching the Cylons; took about a half hour for them to get the new location, a little time to jump and boink! Eventually, the fleet WOULD start failing (either from fatigue, fuel running out, jump drives malfunctioning, etc); the Cylons had time to run the fleet down without risking themselves... the real question is why they decided to go with the Olympic Carrier gambit instead of taking their time. (Seriously, could the Colonials have keep it up for another week? I'd say that's doubtful...)
Holy wall of flak - blessed be its name! 😅😅😅
I watched the original as a kid. That was the real Basestar
This voice sounds familiar resembles to madcanadian from world of warships videos.