It's like playing Metal Gear Solid 3 and actually waiting a week or two before fighting The End, so that he just dies of old age instead of actually being a boss battle. Only you're actually fighting him and the fight takes so long that he dies anyway. Because you suck that bad at fighting. Somehow.
@@PascalRibaux That doesn't mean that the enemy has to be retarded. The Cyclons despite spending all that time studying humans built a front-line capital ship that was countered PERFECTLY by battle star class ships. Star Wars is different because the Emperor's ARROGANCE led to his defeat not rampaging idiocy.
@@Nidhoggrr Arrogance, idiocy.. Potato patato. Once the story is written, you can find all the flaws you want that led to one sides defeat, even in real history. So the story about the cylons was that they planed a mass extinction over a very long period of time resulting in a specific design of their capital ship being unsuited for pursuing and harassing a constantly fleeing/moving fleet. An adaptation takes time, then you got to build the new ship in a place that is suited for that and once finished, sent in poursuit of a fleet with unknown destination. Cyclons thought to be immortal. They had time and resources. They thought, that when they harass the humans long enough, they will go down anyway. Call it arrogance..
@@PascalRibaux Except one leads to a good story and the other leads to plot holes because the cyclons had the time, resources, data and intelligence, so for them to come up with something so idiotic made no sense. What mindless line of reasoning to just say that it's all the same anyway. Just because you cannot understand the nuance in how to write better plot doesn't make them the same. God forbid you ever go near writing.
Basestars = cutting edge ships. Official designation: Cylon Plot Carrier Name: USS Very Vulnerable *Not a typo. Yes, Vulnerable. It was the star wars Empire that named their Star Destroyer "Venerable" a much more optimistic name 😁
They do have a plan. The plan is missiles. They didn't say it was a good plan (seriously at least guide the missiles to strike from all angles instead of direct-firing them into the flak screen)
Guiding a missile in space around a curve isnt that easy. The missile would basically need to rotate 120° on full thrust to achieve that kind of turn, which would require a lot of fuel and reduce speed drastically.
Better yet, use bomb-pumped X-ray lasers, which don’t need to get close to do damage. Use David Weber’s example. They can just go around the flack field and detonate while aiming their lasers at the Galactica. Boom! No need to actually hit the hull.
Actually, this flaw is realistic. They built these weapons for one purpose, so they wouldn't have built in extras. (They have to worry about scarce resources too!). They didn't expect to fight Galactica, so why build ships to do it? Remember history is full of similar mistakes. The US failed to deploy repeating rifles at the start of the Civil War; everyone in WWI failed to change tactics to take account of new weapons. So, it's not surprising that Cylons made a similar stupid mistake.
Sure, but they should have realized that sooner, and if anything stop jumping on the fleet while making some new artillery guns. They could probably salvage a bunch from destroyed battlestars around the colonies if anything. They wouldn't have needed that many really. It would have been enough to at least damage the Galactica, and maybe blow a couple civilian ships too. The only innovation we see are the heavy freighter they used once... once.
That’s not to say that there were no attempts to make up for planning short comings. In ww1 all sides tried to adapt tactics and new weapons to the battle field. Sadly submachine guns, tanks, artillery and aircraft were not effective or their full potential was not realized. You also must consider that nations can learn the wrong ideas from wars. For example, after ww1 America saw the trench fighting and came to the conclusion that infantry were still the main players on the battle field. It took pretty much all of world war 2 for nations to develop the concept of an armored assault supported by infantry and fire support. A simple explanation is that the cylons did not have the means to get out an effective battlestar counter. Or they still thought they could run down the aging and isolated colonial fleet.
Just yesterday i watched a documentary about the Battle of Britain. While designing their aircraft the Nazis apparently did not value the range enough, so that they couldn't reach past London and even then could only spent about 10 minutes over London and then had to return to France, a major hurdle that they did not overcome.
The BSG movie "The Plan" fills in some of the gaps in the first 2 seasons. Regarding the Cylons, particularly the ones hiding in the colonial fleet. They really were completely unprepared for having to mop up a large organized group of survivors. For the most part, the infiltrators were just desperately winging it while trying to create a menacing facade.
A few thoughts: 1. At least until the Cylon civil war and the loss of the hub, it's not clear that destroying Galactica was actually the goal of the model which was in many ways in control of the Cylons. A long, painful hounding chase until things fall apart or supplies run out seems more suited to Cavil's goal or punishing the 5. 2. While the show does a good job concealing this - the original cylon uprising and the skin jobs are not one and the same, and it's not surprising that Cavil and the others would ignore or look down on the tech used by those original cylons.
I disagree with Daniel's assessment on that point. If I remember correctly, BSG attacked a Cylon base in the last episodes of the series to rescue Hera Agathon. BSG rams the base and comes under heavy point defense weapons fire while the rescue team boards the base for the rescue. It is easy to believe that the hull of BSG took such a pounding that it weakened her hull to the point that Colonel Saul Tigh states, "She's broke her back. She'll never jump again."
Well don't forget it was also nuked in the miniseries (still amazed) and got quite a pounding during the evacuation of New Caprica in Exodus part 2. Galactica got her fair share of damage.
One of the reasons Galactica was taken on this dangerous mission was that she was already dying before that. The structual damage was already enourmous, and due to shortcuts in her construction (to get her into service as quick as possible during the first cylon war) and unfinished areas she recieved more and more damage from every FTL jump, to the point where out of nowhere giant cracks appeared in her strutural components. It was then decided by Admiral Adama that it would be better to abandon Galactica, let her die in peace and make the cylon basestar the new fleet flagship (after the cylon civil war one basestar teams up with the colonial fleet). Equipment, personal, weapons and fighters were already tranferred to the basestar when they recieved information about the colony and Hera being kept there by the cylons. They, they decide to try to rescure Hera, and use the Galactica for it. Adama even thought they would never come back from this mission. You are right that that last battle completly killed Galactica, but her structural damage was already severe before that and it would only have been a matter of weeks until the same effect would be there without the last battle.
The Cylons were for all intents and purposes an immortal race, only with a slow respawn rate. They could easily afford to play the slow game of wearing your enemy down. Eps 33, and Scare demonstrated this perfectly. Continued attacks wore the Colonials down, and wrecked their psyche, while with each death the Cylons grew better at fighting Colonials. This mentality did however backfire in the end when they lost the Resurrection Tech.
The Cylons did have a plan, destroy humanity at the 12 colonies and keep the survivors running until they died from exhaustion. It said multiple times throughout the series, the Cylons are immortal machines, they could take unthinkable losses and simply resurrect. Over the course of the series, they probably lost twice as many shifts as the colonial fleet had if not more and didn’t think twice about it if it meant that they were able to take out a ship or two of humanity. Too them, it’s simply did not matter how long it took her how much life was lost, neither held any meaning to them. When they lost the resurrection hub, everything changed however and arguably The need to restore resurrection, or embrace procreation became more important than wiping out humanity. In fact, if I recall after the hub was destroyed account there were no further major engagements between the two sides until the final battle at the colony. This mentality, really explains almost all of the Cylon tactics used. The overreliance on missiles, the weapons platform approach versus actual battleship approach of the base stars, the swarm tactics of the raiders, all of it was geared towards rapid for strike and overwhelming with a rinse and repeat which can only be done with essentially with a strategy that uses unlimited resources and immortality. Had the resurrection hub not been destroyed when it was, the colonial fleet would’ve found itself under the protection of the rebel base star far longer than it was. It’s actually an amazing tactical error on the Cylons part that the hub wasn’t constantly guarded by its own fleet round the clock or parked in orbit of a black hole like the colony was. They lost the moment the hub went up.
To be fair its easy to forget how much of a successful first strike the fall of the colonies were, put quite simply the Resurrection hub and all subsequent victories always seemed to me to just be the underestimation of a small survivor group after you have effectively destroyed over 99% of their population and military facilities. Its like a group of french resistance fighters blowing up an oil facility in the heartland of Nazi Germany, you would not guard against it because you would never anticipate such an unlikely hood.
Did the entire Cylon race chase after the Galactica? What happen to all the Cylons back at the colonies and in their own space? You would think they would have established their own home world.
The Cylon black hole base was already their "homeworld" As they are machines they dont really need a world with specific conditions or environments beyond non of the hazardous radiation that damages their circuits. Outside of visiting them for experimentation and anthropology they really did not need the worlds of the colonies. Beyond that they essentially had all the necessary facilities for their continued existence already jumping around wherever they needed them. Their own space was predominantly just mining bases. The entirety of Cylon existence after the first war was spent building up to the second and dealing with the final five. As for what happened after words the allot of the Cylons were destroyed in the civil war, those that remained afterwards were likely stranded or disconnected groups of Centurions and Basestars, they either kept doing what they were programmed to do and eventually broke down, or had the self awareness upgrade and figured out something else and bummed off to god knows where.
only the rebel's had self awareness and the survivor's of that faction out right admit that they where almost completely destroyed by the One faction in ambushes it's why they hit the Resurrection hub as the ones had taking all the Resurrection ships and needed Galactica to do so
As a new viewer, I'm honestly really liking this aspect of BSG. Too many sci-fi shows and movies treat their alien adversaries, especially robots, as logical, unstoppable forces of nature. While BSG certainly portrays the Cylons as deadly and effective in many situations, particularly in the destruction of the Twelve Colonies, they have significant flaws in terms of arrogance and failure to adapt to a changing situation. It's like they spent so long planning for one, specific attack that they didn't even think about contingencies -- in essence, they put all of their eggs in one basket and paid the price throughout the rest of the show.
Agree. If you observe Deep Mind's artificial intelligence (AlphaStar - a StarCraft 2 AI Player), you will notice some strengths and weaknesses in relation to human players. If your small army (with a transport ship) is surrounded by a large enemy army, you should sacrifice the army and kill as much as you can. AlfaStar puts them in the transport ships and again loses the army by fleeing (the army cannot fire from the transport ships) without trying to kill even a unit of the enemy army (We are talking about a situation where it is clear to a person that you cannot escape on the ground or by air). It is true that we cannot compare Deepmind's Alfastar with the Super advanced Cylons, but it can also be a good example of the difference between the human thinking and that of the artificial intelligence.
The survivors of the 12 colonies rippled throughout all the Cylon like an error, and it affected all of them, that later caused the system to break and lead to an unclearable error, that caused the jamming single to reactive the 4/5 and that broke the Cylons logic systems and then it was Cylon against Cylon, one error boke the entire society if you can call it that. The question was are they alive, or are they just real-life, like robot that feels alive?
NO sci fi shows and movies actually have good enemies, else the "good guys" and therefor the main characters would lose easily lose because they are humans and have emotions and no real intelligence. 1 robot should be able to kill millions of people because it reacts faster and sees in 360 degrees and can dodge bullets and any situation it could go into where it could be tricked it will just ignore. exist for 1ms in its vision and you instantly perish. tanks cant hit it. planes cant shoot it. mines will be predicted. it will punch through walls and jump between buildings. 1 small AI "ship" with no crew interior nonsense would be able to destroy galactica by just drilling into it and nuking it after dodging its giant guns and shooting down all their vipers by turning faster than them. of course if this happened starbuck would get super powers and float in space with a magic laser then go back to being normal.
@@jasonissel217 One of the major points of the show is that they ARE alive, and the reason for the whole conflict was humanity's lack of recognition of that single fact
Just as many sci-fi shows and movies have illogical, stupid enemies who repeatedly hand what should be easy victories for them to the scruffy underdog good guys on a silver platter by being almost comically underprepared for sometimes not even very creative, if still unconventional tactics. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the reverse is true: Too many stories in general have incompetent villains who create their own weaknesses and consistently fail to adapt to cover them up in time. The Empire in Star Wars, most of the enemy factions in Stargate, the Covenant and Banished (At least in ground engagements) in Halo, and the Cylons in both versions of BSG are all glaring examples of the exact opposite problem to the one you've described. For a rather notable example from novels, look at the Race from Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series. While these antagonistic factions don't necessarily have _zero_ adaptability, they are not flexible enough, or quick enough to change in order to avoid being outsmarted by their otherwise weaker opponents.
I think the new Basestars were designed to fight disabled enemies that could not shoot back. That would make the backdoor in Baltars CNP actually crucial to the success of the invasion of the Colonies instead of being an added bonus. An analysis of the battle tactics used by the cylons during the invasion and how it might have gone had the Colonial fleet not introduced the new program (or if the backdoor had failed) would be interesting.
I think they shortly address this in the show, with one Cylon(I think a Six) stating to Gaius Baltar that there was no way the Cylons would have won a direct engagement with Colonial Fleet. According to the Cylons this was because they (the Cylons) were inherently more peaceful, weird as that may sound. It probably had to do more with the fact that they couldn't learn from their military mistakes, because the lack of consequenses for losing were negligible due to resurrection technology.
It sounds like it would have been a complete curbstomp of the Cylon fleet if the Colonial Fleet had been at full strength (even allowing for some losses due to the surprise attack), but without knowing where the Cylon base of operations was, the Cylons could retreat 'beyond the red line' and regroup to consider their options.
TheOneWhoMightBe There's no doubt that the Colonials would agressively push out in all directions looking for the Cylon Home world. They might also have the impetus to kick their fleet production into overdrive so they can accomplish just that.
the cylons would have never won in a direct engagement the colonial had 120 active battlestar's with 30 to 40 of which are the large Jupiter and Mercury classes. the rest where Valkyrie's which where said to relied on missile much more then any other colonial warship and even then it's mostly that it's 33 heavy gun's could fire missile as well as normal rounds of the colonials. who also had a unknown number of other warships ( as well as the fleet boneyard) all of which relied on powerful gun's with strong flak and point defence systems alongside heavy armour with Viper support to protect their ships the Cylon mass raider and missile strategy with almost no point defense gun's or any other weapons and thin but slowly regenerative armour is just about the worst thing they could use ageist them. the only advantage they would have is that the colonial's don't know where they are.they have better ftl( more energy effective with better computers to calculate jump's) resurrection and spy's that the human's don't know of but it's unlikely to stay that way when the war starts up. and Adar will have no choice but to fall to the military's demands unless he want's killed by his own people ( he was already no liked by the military's and most other department's)
They never had a plan. No, really. Ron Moore has said in a number of interviews that the line was only included in the opening of the show because David Eick thought it sounded cool.
The writers never had a plan, that's the sad part. And why the story fizzled into a silly, disappointing ending with much left unexplained and probably unexplainable.
@@ian_b Ron Moore said they only planned 10 episodes ahead. Babylon 5 on the other hand was written with a grand plan with adjustments along the way due to things like a lead actor suffering a mental illness and an other having drug addiction.
That ending gave me cancer, such a shame. I loved it for the most part, but they ran out of ideas and steam. Deep Space 9 and Babylon this was not, so say we all
Wouldn't be the first time a military totally misjudged how the newest war would be fought. In Vietnam, missile tech was seen as such a game changer that the hot new F-4 Phantom shipped without an internal gun and their pilots hated it.
@@alanwake5239 in an age of lock on air to air missiles, but before significant ECM advances, guns on a fighter seemed obsolete. Especially because most bullets and shells fired from an aircraft at an aircraft will miss. It was seen as a waste of bullets, which it kind of was. Loading a plane down with ammo that will most likely miss was seen as an inefficient use of a plane’s carrying capacity. Better aiming and flight control systems developed later made fighters with guns more efficient with their bullets.
Guns are terrible for space combat. In space, a shell can't do anything a missile of similar mass cannot do, and the missile does many things better. If you do happen to hit a large missile, most of the fragments would just continue to travel in a straight line and impact the target anyway. The missile can go faster and hit harder since it accelerates not only in a barrel, but during the intervening travel. They were trying to keep it more "realistic" and not using science fiction weaponry like plasma bolts or ammunition traveling at 90% light speed. The biggest issue was all the tiny little explosive missiles they fired. If they had used 20 ton kinetic warheads (big balls of iron) they would have smashed the Galactica apart.
@@davidmoore1880 "If they had used 20 ton kinetic warheads (big balls of iron) they would have smashed the Galactica apart." Space shotguns on a grand scale.
@@davidmoore1880 I would disagree... a lot. Kinetic energy is a real killer. Especially in space where there's none of that pesky friction to slow down your shots.
Inability to adapt was also the weakness of the Cylons in the 1978 Battlestar Galactica. They were in a stalemate for 1000 years and only human treachery brought about any progress, and then they were in a stalemate against just one ship.
The flaw wasn't on the ships, but on the cylons themselves. They underestimated their enemies. That's the biggest and dumbest mistake you can commit in times of war.
Strange: there are a lot of mistakes in wars of the earth history, where it was the other way around: they thought, that the enemy was way stronger. And lost because of that. Search for "empty fort strategy". Rommel won this way in africa by building fake tanks, so that the British thought him way stronger, as he really was. To make fun of some power because of having underestimate or overestimate the enemy shows me, that you have absolutely no idea of any form of warfare.
you think that through out the entire time they were attacking the galactica, and FAILING that maybe they should try something other then just missiles? its one thing to underestimate your opponent, another but similar thing to overestimate yourself, but to fail to adapt after countless failures is just incompetent
@@baldurkukukari4051 The idea is to never let the enemy know how strong you are in difference locations. So you want to seem stronger in some places and weaker in others, that way (hopefully) the enemy won't attack your weak points, but might fall into a trap that completely wrecks their forces. In space it might be harder to pull off than just having inflatable tanks, etc, but it still might be possible.
Your humanizing machines, computers type a command and it happens, when the command errors, then the computer can't clear the error, then it keeps looping. Command All colonies to be nuked from orbit, Command virus tells all battlestars to shut down...error; error two battlestars survived....command virus shut down all battlestars, error, error, battlestars still active. That will keep going until the command line is changed, or the Cylons destroy themselves from an unclearlable error. Which is exactly what happened.
Highgrounder: The Pegasus is a perfect example of how strong Galactica's plot armor was. Despite technically being the superior ship the Pegasus was sacrificed to save the Galactica. I think Eckhart's Ladder's channel even did a video comparing the plot armor of the lead ships from various sci-fi IPs and decided Galactica's was the strongest.
The reason for this is simple. They were never meant to fight battlestars. Basestars are specifically designed for planetary siege. They jump in, release raiders to keep defenders busy and nuke the living shit out of the planet. Even if the entire colonial military fleet survived, it would be useless, with no colonies, shipyards or industry to back them up. The only thing Cylons had to do is to be around so they can nuke any base the fleet tries to build. The battlestars would eventually fall apart from wear. Which is precisely what happened.
yeah sure but it wont take long for people to realise that basestars are shit and they should send fleets hunting them down. Area denial only works when it cant be chased off so easily.
@@Queue3612 Like I said, basestars are specifically designed for blitzkrieg (or hit&run) planetary bombardment. Not area denial. If basestar attacks you, your planet/base will be nuked into oblivion before you penetrate the fleet of raiders and get to the basestar. At that point, the basestar can just retreat, because it accomplished its mission of crippling your supply chain.
@@KohuGaly but galactica ships can fight off 2 or 3 at a time and win. all you need to do si chase off the basestars and they cant do their job. all the cylons bring are basestars and as such are only capable of planetary bombardment, that is all.
@@KohuGaly It's not unbelievable that Cylons would build such weapons for planetary bombardment. The unbelievable or implausible part is that they build nothing else and continue to use basestars against the Galactica for 5 years without learning something.
Totally agree. The cylon plan put their money behind a 1) Infiltration for sabotage/reconnaissance 2) Universally-distributed cyberattack 3) Massive initial strike, shock, and awe.
The Baseships weren’t designed for war. They were designed for genocide. Hunting down a battlestar commanded by the best tactical strategist ever wasn’t part of the plan.
Yup, their entire fleet hinged on the battle tactic of pearl harbor-ing your enemy into defeat. And to be fair, it worked. The hack succeeded, and they wiped out humanity, save for those 40.000 running away. But there isn't a single doubt in my mind that the Cylons would've been curb-stomped by the colonials if the hack failed.
@@denneledoe873 That's pretty much what the Cylons were thinking. They knew they would lose a war of attrition, even with resurrection technology, so they had to win in 1 strike.
@@HelghastStalker Which bothers me because the Colonials are supposed to have anywhere from 120 to 240 Battlestars of which only 2 survived due to glitches or being hardened. That makes no sense to network the new generation if the Cylons are still out there and the last season plus Blood & Chrome heavily implies the Cylons were winning the first war until the Final Five convinced them to agree to an armistice. Even if the Cylons were just hacking their way to win in the first war, it would suggest the Cylons have figured out how to make more than a bunch of aircraft missile spam carriers.
@@Taospark It implies, but doesn't outright state they were winning. Actually, I'd suggest it was more of a case that the Colonials didn't really know how good (or bad) the Cylons were actually doing during the first war. They just assumed the Cylons were doing good, but for all we know the Cylons were the ones on the verge of defeat. That having been said, the Cylons that were fighting Humanity during the first war are not the same as the ones we saw during the second war. And let's face it, Cylon technology from the first war had its roots in Colonial technology, and Cavil hated anything that reminded him of humanity. So my theory's that Cavil refused to run with anything that would admit the Colonials might be right, even such a small way as "Their way of fighting IS solid".
@@HelghastStalker That would make sense because the base ships are these nimble battleships with way more firepower and fighters. Also, the original Cylons probably didn't bother building ships so much as just floating in space until they could board a battlestar and make their way to aft damage control like Adama recalls. It's basically free battlestars or at least munitions without having to build warships from scratch like the Colonials did mid-war. If we go with the mention that the Colonials had 120-240 Battlestars before the second war, then Cavil's Basestars had no chance unless they could hack the Colonial ships.
In the words of Black Adder: "Would that be the plan to continue with total slaughter until everyone's dead except Field Marshal Haig, Lady Haig and their tortoise, Alan?"
@Maintenance Renegade I've always joked that Battlestar Galactictica should have been called "Lost in Space." "They have a plan" - but the writers have no idea what it is...
@@RichFreeman How to make a Cylon break: "The following statement is true... They have a plan." The Cylon will break, because it's a robot confronted by a paradox.
I would like to see a comparison between the Cylon Baseships of the 1978 series vs the Cylon Basestars of the 2004 series, detailing the differences in size, weapons, and Raider compliments.
Failed to mention Pegasus, Mercury class Battlestar that can take on multiple baseships and jam inbound missiles. Galactica actually had a difficult time defending itself. Basestars were dependent on electronic warfare and far range warfare so if they brawled point blank they were fucked.
To be fair, the Galactica has graetly reduced combat abilities at the time. she was meant to be scrapped and many guns and armor plates were already removed, when the show starts. During her prime time, those new basestars woudln´t stand a chance. The new basestars look and act like glass cannons, while the old basestars are more than a serious threat even to a fully armed battlestar in its prime time.
Galactica was to become a museum. That's why one of the flight pods is sealed off and filled with exhibits of vipers and stuff from the first war. It makes no sense to me why they removed guns and armor, but they did. If you watch Blood and Chrome, you see that in full fighting trim Galactica was an absolute monster- the entire topside was covered in heavy cannons and there was no exposed hull ribbing. If *that* ship was there during the exodus, things would have been different.
wll1500 It actually makes a LOT of sense for multiple reasons. One: Why would you waste a perfectly good beast of an arsenal on an aging, outdated ship that wont even be used anymore when you can strap it to a shiny new ship and get more use out of it, or at least break it down for parts? The Romans and those afterwards often broke down ruined buildings for their materials, often to build something else nearby out of those same reclaimed parts. Two: Security Risks. Keeping a fully functioning, or at least mostly functioning arsenal of weapons on a warship, one that is VERY easily accessed by most civilians, could likely lead to a hijack and following rampage. You do not want a fully armed beast of a warship you thought was out of the picture suddenly mowing your fleets down, or worse. As was mentioned before, the Galactica was viewed as an outdated relic that had no use compared to the more modern, far more advanced ships of that day. Just because a ship is effective 40 or so years ago does NOT mean it shall remain as effective in the present, especially if other ships outclass it in technology by far.
@@higueraft571 lol what? As part of the decommissioning they dumped all the munitions. That's why they had to stop by Ragnar. Civilians could have hijacked a ship with no ammo I guess. Plus, Galacticas guns and armor were as old as the ship itself. I don't think they would have robbed them for use on another ship.
I absolutely LOVE the distinct "Hitchhikkers' Guide to the Galaxy" vibe in this video! If you ever get the urge to include that vibe again, please indulge!
In universe I think it shows part of the difference between the leadership of the synthetic human cylons and the purely robotic cyclons. As the nature of the Cylon civilization changed so did their outlook and capacity to adapt.
The destruction of the cylon base around the black hole due to nuclear missile impacts is probably the best example of such said bad tactics. Awesome video, as always.
Been waiting for this :D I guess the cylons where 100% dependent on wiping out all humans in the first attack instead of actual ship to ship combat which ended poorly against the Galatica a ship designed to combat cylon vessels of stronger design in the first cylon war. Because lets be honest. The first war cylon vessels based of colonial design where better at fighting colonial ships than the new ships .
They got within an inch of succeeding though. All but 2 basestars were wiped out, all but 10K humans were subjugated. In that respect, the Basestar was a HUGE success. It was never designed to fight Battlestars in protracted fights.
@ilove bigbrother Examples of such "coherent and logical enemies/weapon design and long successful stories"? If their logic is perfect, they cannot fail continuously. That's not ... logic. QED
@@SamaritanPrime Tyrol: Admiral Holdo, it is with regret I inform you that our FTL on this show is instantaneous point-to-point jumps. There's no such thing as ramming and it's impossible to appear inside another ship.
@@void2258 didn't stop her in the Star Wars universe where FTL was subspace tunneling and objects in subspace disintegrate on overlap with no realspace effect.
I always interpreted the Galactica's death as just having been blown up and shot and patched together over and over so many times and doing so many jumps it finally gave up. Also the Adama Manoeuvre. That couldn't have been good for it.
Basic ballistic weaponry can also be mitigated with flak or other point defense depending on the range of the engagement. The farther out the attacking ship the greater the chance that its attack will be intercepted by countermeasures.
Another downside to balistic weaponry is that it can only fire in straight lines, a shell, once fired, can't maneuver. So, if your target is reasonably maneuverable guns will have a hard time hitting its target. A missile, on the other hand, can be designed to track its target and follow every move it makes until it runs out of fuel. You can also fire missiles from a lot farther away than a gun by simply launching them ballistically and have them simply coast in (since there's no drage to slow them down) until a certain point before turning on their engines.
There's a lot that can be said for big dumb slugs flying at high speed through space. first of which is that you'd have to hit it with enough energy to change it's deflection. That means flak might ding it up and slow it down, but it isn't going to shred slugs apart the way it does to missiles and fighters. Second point is that just because it's not a missile, doesn't mean it's not guided. A simple RCS can't propel a slug fast enough to do anything, but it can error correct over time. Hell even a flywheel on a gimbal can steer a projectile. Last is that the reload time would be negligible. Suddenly you're firing these guided 20 meter long kinetic impactors a fraction of the speed of light like a machine gun. And your only limitation is how fast you can bleed off heat.
Just put a maneuvering pod on the shells. Or, better yet: Use kinetic kill vehicles. Even if they get intercepted by countermeasures, there's a good chance they'll do damage.
To be fair, I had the impression that part of the reason that final jump killed Galactica was because she had taken such a beating from the *artillery* systems mounted on the Colony. But also the metal rot lol
Another aspect is that the colonial Battlestar is a double-edged sword for the Cylons. Notice how they *always* engage side on like two ships at broadside. To me, this is because despite the disadvantage of facing the Battlestars flak fields. The Cylons never position their ships in front of the Galactica or Pegasus, due to their main batteries facing forward. To engage in this would be suicide. We see that when Lee Adama destroys a Baseship in seconds with the pegasuses main battery at the exodus of New Caprica.
It seems like the Cylons put all their cards in initially destroying the 12 Colonies and their defenders in the initial attack. And didn't consider the possibility of any meaningful counterattacks or surviving warships.
all and all that plan was pretty successful too. exactly 2 military vessels survive and both of then do it through sheer blind luck. the Pegasus just so happened to have had its entire computer systems underoing maintenance and easily could have jumped itself into a star, and had the Cylons attacked litterally an hour later Galactica would have been a completely useless museum. no one would expect the USS Consitution to Duke it out with a modern Zumwalt Class.
@@TWEAKLET Old Ironsides wouldn't do much more than dent the side of the Zumwalt's superstructure before getting shredded by the 5-inch gun. That being said, a better comparison would be the USS North Carolina in her final refit from 1945 facing the Nuclear Battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy as he currently stands right now .
They had infiltrators on both battlestars and immortal Raiders to run them down as more survivors kept dying. The chase just strained their complete lack of civilization, culture, or determination creating religious then political schisms until one side joined the Colonials to blow their homebase to hell.
@@Taospark The problem is that Cavil was the one who engineered the war, and he didn't actually have a plan for "After We Win", since...well, he was throwing (as TV tropes put it) a Galactic-sized Temper Tantrum against his creators. He just wanted his creators and Humanity dead, and worry about literally EVERYTHING ELSE later. Then later came, and his lack of foresight bit him in the ass hardcore.
It is interesting to note that the Hierarchy of the Cyclons also had Wardens, those that wanted to wait and take a measured, thorough approach and meticulous approach, to the annihilation of the Human Species, and the Crusaders, who were chomping at the bit to END the Humans As Fast As Possible. Had the Wardens won out, they very well may have wiped out Humanity by building contingencies into the Battle Plans.
Cylons should have kept the Basestar variant from Blood & Chrome - it had guns, missiles, lots of Raiders, and visually seemed to be armored. BTW, how about a comparison of 4 Basestar variants? Original, Blood&Chrome Variant, Guardians Variant and the new one?
Basestars aren't useless; They're pretty damn good at their single purpose: Wiping out humanity based on 12 planets in a nuclear holocaust, and cyberwarfare. The problem was that they didn't expect anything capable of fleeing to survive. And lets face it, the only reason the Galactica survived to New Earth was through divine intervention (read: extremely thick plot armor). If three basestars had jumped into the middle of the fleet like they did when the rebel basestar did when the Demetrius had FTL problems, they could have launched nukes against half of the fleet before Adama even order an alert. That didn't happen, somehow, despite having precise tracking information from the Olympic Carrier for the first couple of days, when they were still in the Cyrannus system with plenty of support to blow the fleet out of the sky.
I always was so annoyed by how the Basestars were designed. Such a joke. Think about it, if the battlestars aimed for that pylon where it connects the Y arms, It would just split in two and it would be useless already. If Gaius Baltar wasn't such an idiot, the Colonial Fleet would have whipped the Cylons off the floor with their Pegasus-class battlestars and Viper MKVII. Another example would have been the Battle of Ragnar Anchorage, 3 modernized basestars versus a 40 year old battlestar and the battlestar managed to fend off the three basestars and escaped relatively unscathed. Battle of the Resurrection Ship, two battlestars, old and new, versus two basestars and completely wiped the floor on them. Hardly a competition.
Basestars would be pretty good carriers if they actually used them like carriers instead of constantly closing the distance with fraking battlestars. In the series, Galactica was never able to simply defeat the enemy fighter swarm, they always won by taking out the command ships or other plot devices like viruses. Carriers need escorts though. Plus in the BSG universe if you're about to be overwhelmed by fighters you can usually just FTL away, which is another flaw in not having immediate, decisive firepower through use of guns
Most sci fi writers also don't understand why missiles, which base stars have plenty, are superior to fighters. Lower mass , able to pull higher Gs for more maneuver ability.
@@Kay0Bot "If a cylon gets a missile lock on you, get into a high G turn, call to your wingman to shoot it down, try to get something between you and it and don't forget to pray" - Starbuck.
@ZonTheDon what's your point? That missiles aren't a guarantee hit? That statement is true for anything...depends on how far you get into physics and probability. My point is in space a guided missile is better option than an unguided projectiles projectiles. That's actually true in our current tech on earth.
To their credit, Galactica was built for her job. She’s practically a a baby war star (which scales to infinity class super ships like in halo) And to the cylons, only number 1 wanted war and used subterfuge to get it. Presses the question, did the subterfuge come before or after new base stars?
I noticed this whilst playing deadlock using the Argos basestar (or even the regular basestar to some degree), they just can't hold up against battlestars. The Cylons need a battlestar equivalent, something durable and hard hitting but not reliant on missiles.
I think, the biggest (balancing) issue in Deadlock is, that firing up your flakfield disables a Battlestars side-guns... Which are technically classified as point-defense!! Activating your Flak should deactivate your top Battlestar-Artillery (or at leas drastically reduce its effect). The port- and starboard-guns may switch in a defensive-mode for additional accuracy for reduced range!!
Let's not forget that a very significant part in the Cylon's battle doctrine was being able to hack and shut down any and all Colonial craft. If that were possible with all Colonial ships (which is close to 100% of them, except the Galactica of course) then the Cylons wouldn't need to worry much about defensive measures.
The opening montage shows a tour guide describing this - that Galactica was deliberately built primitive to be unhackable - and deriding it in the same breath. Then Baltar happens...
The Cylon plan reminds me of the US Air Force's plan in Vietnam. Removing guns from aircraft and becoming dependent on missiles. So yes, I can see why the Cylons would think this is a sound tactic. Also, even after realizing their mistake, they were pursuing an evading fleet, and they couldn't exactly pull ships and send them to be refitted.
That was not "the plan in Vietnam". The problem is that the US had long since been moving toward all-missile fighters because it expected to fight a very different war - an open nuclear shooting war against incoming enemy bombers that didn't require politically motivated visual ID. Early missiles had terrible reliability and performance issues, and taking them into close high-G dogfights, catapulting them repeatedly off the deck and landing back on with them unfired over and over again (and in tropical conditions too, with salt-spray issues for the carriers) likewise didn't help. They were being asked to fight a war they hadn't been designed for.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy, which is why you need multiple plans and contigencies along with the ability and confidence to switch between and adapt these plans.
I haven't seen more than the first few episodes, but from what you've said, I this the Cylons' problem was that they had a plan that they refused to deviate from. When unexpected things like Galactica surviving happened they failed to adapt their philosophy and their ships to the new reality.
I think the basestars were designed to suit a particular purpose and they performed very well in that regard. I think the first battle of the series gives a very good indication of how the Cylons would have fought if the plan had failed. They simply sit back and allow their missiles to bombard a Battlestar at range while their raiders take care of the vipers before moving onto the Battlestar as well. If I remember correctly, the Galactica was actually hit by a few missiles in that engagement. So if we assume that the Cylon strategy for the baseships is long range bombardment and raider support, their design makes sense. The long arms for multiple missile batteries and a central section capable of deploying dozens if not over a hundred raiders as once, would allow them to quickly overwhelm a Battlestar. I think the ballistic weapon argument is difficult to make for two reasons. Firstly, if the Cylons favoured long range bombardment, there’s a chance that a Battlestar could simply move out of the way before the projectile arrived, a missile (depending on its type) can be controlled and redirected to wherever the Battlestar is. Secondly, there’s no guarantee that Galactica’s flak field would not have destroyed it like the missiles. The projectiles the battlestars use seem to be quite slow moving, giving the flak field ample opportunity to destroy or deflect the round (if used by the Cylons). Finally, I think that we missed out in a sense with BSG. I love the series but I’d have loved to have seen the long range bombardment strategy of the Cylons face off against the close with the enemy strategy of the Colonials. We get snippets of this like with the battle of the resurrection ship or the battle where Apollo takes control of Pegasus but seeing a full fleet engagement start to finish would have been amazing.
Tecnically the BaseStars do have a defense ... in the battle of the hub you can see they use missiles to intercept other incoming missiles.. and those missiles seem to behave like antiaircraft cluster flak.. exploding and expanding snaprel to intercept incoming warheads.. that however probably has little efficiency against the Galactical gauss guns
@@piotrd.4850 Unsure how those would work in space since combustion in the near vacuum would be next to impossible. I always thought they were a sort of railgun, just far slower than what we would think a sci-fi railgun slug should be. (Around the speed or only a few times faster than conventional artillery in the real world.)
They did not plan for the BSG. Considering nearly ever Battlestar were destroyed in the opening salvo. The Pegasus only escaped by doing a blind jump. So really it was a good design for their plans.
They must not have considered the Galactica a factor in the upcoming conflict, relying wholly on their electronic subversion to eliminate any flak systems.
Even so, during one of the episodes (no spoilers) Adama said they can't hold off 3 Basestars. Even with the Flak Shield, there are times when missiles do get through and detonate.
Two notes: 1) IRL, changing tactics and more importantly developing new weaponry needed to change those tactics is time consuming, and requires a massive investment of industry and manpower, so it's not really remarkable that, once the Cylons' basic error was revealied, they didn't have enough time to fix it. You see this in WW2, where the Axis was largely unable to change their tactics or adapt to new situations, whereas US forces - having ludicrously massive testing and construction facilities, and money being literally no object - were able to adapt over the course of the war, developing new weapons, new attack strategies, and so on, which allowed them to exploit the AXIS weakness. 2) The RDM Cylons are kinda dumb. As RDM himself said, "The Cylons would have lost the first war if it had gone on much longer, which is why they agreed to the truce." Their strategy in the 2nd war was entirely based around the surprise attack, and, again quoting RDM, "In a fair fight the Cylons could not win a ware against the colonials."
They didn't build battle ships; they built luxury homes that shoot. They didn't expect a lengthy hunt or fire fight after the attack. The basestar design wasn't a mistake. The mistake was the skinjobs not turning over operational control of the hunt to the centurians. No tricks, no parlay, just rigid efficiency.
Frakking Baltar 😂 He was my favorite character because he filled so many roles. Villain, Genius, Lackey, Savior, Stooge, Leader and Blithering Idiot. I flip-flopped so much on how I felt towards his character. One week I'd want him dead. The next week I'd feel bad for him. After that I'd think he was the only reasonable person in the show but then he'd make me want to kill him again. It was *so* good.
They had a plan. Pearl Harbor or maybe Barbarossa in space. Plan A but no plan B. The Cylons' plan was to win this war in just this one battle, wiping out the entire colonial fleet. Galactica and Pegasus escaping the assault and still being operational was not part of their plan or even considered a possibility. That's why the Cylons' base stars were not designed and equipped to deal with a battle star. So their overconfidence made the Cylons indeed very human.
I always felt Galactica should've Sacrificed itself at New Caprica, and Adama's crew were forced to transfer to Pegasus. Then after a few episodes on Pegasus, they rename it Galactica in Honor of it and her crew's sacrifice.
The pegasus was designed as a newer and smarter longer range engagement Battlestar. He Galactica was a tried and tested beast that survived an actual war. Don't forget the colonials put all their eggs in the smart fleet tech thinking it will keep them safe and the cylons didn't expect Galactica to even survive.
I imagine that their primary combat focus is electronic warfare, and as a result, their physical weaponry is not designed to defeat countermeasures that would otherwise be knocked out due to their primary assault on the ships command and control systems. 🤔
+Sujian 54 Kodai, prepare the Wave Motion Gun... ... 30 seconds later.. humanity erased, only anime characters with a distinct nostalgic 70s style remain. Also fan service.
@@Tuning3434 Overkill. The conventional weapons on the battleship is more than sufficient to deal with it. Besides there might be something valuable aboard the Galactica. It's jump drive.
@@marrqi7wini54 While I didn't really went into watching into S2 of BSG, I am fairly sure they don't galaxy-skip. Spacebattleship Yamato's primary purpose was to travel to another galaxy. I'm fairly sure the wave motion engine is considerably more powerful than BSG's jump drive.
Galactica and Pegasus essentially 'one-shot' basestars on multiple occasions while taking an absolute beating. Part of me assumes basestars aren't dedicated warships, and if they're supposed to be carriers then why do they always close the distance in a battle? Theres no logic to the tactics & weaponry the cylons use imo. A couple of battlestar-esque ships to mop up any resistance from the invasion would have been invaluable. Even if they couldn't forsee anything less than total victory its still idiotic to have such a minimalistic arsenal in a war. Whilst overwhelming the colonials with fighters would seemingly be effective, theres a *SLIGHT* flaw being that ships can just peace-out-FTL before that happens
Exactly! On top of that, the initial invasion relied completely on the virus killing all the ships it did. If even a handful of Battlestars had been behind on their software updates, the Cylons would have been fucked! The Basestar isn't warship, it's a munitions delivery platform.
they also could have literally just made battlestar-copies or even improved battlestars of their own, in greater numbers than the colonials, and beat them through attrition. The basestars seem to be designed for attacking with impunity which is odd since cyclons can resurrect, why would they be afraid of fighting face-to-face? At the same time it also seems perfectly designed to be hard-countered by battlestars (virus shenanigans not withstanding). Maybe they thought 'whats the point building a battlestar copy when the colonials will just nuke it into submission no matter how armoured it is'. But cyclons made FTL fighters that can carry nukes (ENORMOUS advantage over the colonials!) yet they keep engaging with their fraking carrier vessels! The carriers don't even need to be in the same solar system as the battle! I also don't think its a stretch to assume the cylons could make excellent stealth fighters if they tried too (why haven't they?!). Even if the colonials eventually developed a countermeasure, they still would have been extremely valuable in the initial invasion
I suspect the Basestars were essentially orbital bombardment carriers. They worked well in their initial role of destroying a bunch of disabled colonial ships and bombing the hell out of their planets. They were just not suited for a pursuit role at all. Still, I mean... it's hard to really call the Cylons a failure, given they practically made humans extinct overnight. The basestars were basically designed to perform that sudden strike before the humans had any idea what was going on, so that constituted just a ton of firepower, without much defense.
The Cylons have a plan... the writer's might not, but the Cylons have a... series of directives and loose goals... also they did a vision board party last week, that was very exciting.
Glad they fixed this in Blood & Chrome, the Basestars used are shown firing canons/flak. Shame we won't see more of them though as that series never even got its first season :(
Those were the old 1st war basestars which were designed to be front-line battleships. The new 2nd war basestars were designed to be long-range strategic strike platforms, as the cylon plan didn't account for having to actually fight a resisting enemy.
Cyclons thought they were going to wipeout the 12 colonies completely. But wars develop a life of their own and the need to survive is perhaps the strongest drive in the human race.
humans are stubborn and don't give up. It would actually interesting to see how we would compare to aliens. Have they an even more raging hard on for war and conflict as humanity or are they all peaceloving hippies?
Ayy's being peaceloving hippies is unrealistic tbh. If they didnt have the drive to survive then they wouldnt have becomethe dominant species of their respective homeworlds and wouldnt have survived long enough to make it into space.
Again, nothing on that planet would have became smart enough to travel to space if that were the case. It wouldnt be logical for that to happen if they didnt have predators to worry about like us humans do. We are only the apex species of our planet because we make better tools than all other species on the planet. Otherwise the lions, tigers, bears etc would be the top dog on planet earth.
ebolamorph you misunderstand, It’s a level of scale ours verses theirs on earth a rabbit is a prey species and a weak one on their world it could be an apex predator after all they are “alien”. For all we know we could live on the galactic equivalent of a death world.
One could make the argument, loosely, that the Basestars were designed with the idea that the Cylons would not have to contend with a fleet that was composed of any, in any capacity, Colonial warships. The Basestars would arrive in system, park in orbit over a planet, and just pepper the surface with nukes killing off the population while Cylon raiders and heavy raiders dealt with any civilian space traffic and whatever limited defenses the colonies were thought to have. The Cylons were met with little to no real resistance when they launched their attacks. This only cemented their assumptions to be fact. By the time they discovered a single Battlestar had survived (two once the Pegasus resurfaced) they relised the mistake they made, but it was far too little to late. They had built so many Basestars that having to refit the fleet with projectile/kinetic weaponry, to destroy two Battlestars, would be too time consuming and impractical. They figured their ships were so vastly superior to a Battlestar that just employing sheer overwhelming force would simply win the day. There was simply no way, in their minds, that the humans could win or survive for very long. To the Cylons it was simply a matter of time and they were not required to apply effort beyond what we saw them use.
@AKUJIRULE Babylon 5 certainly had more good seasons than BSG with it's 3 (closer to 2.5 really) good seasons. But I'd say BSG at it's best was better than Babylon 5 at it's best (I'm not even sure Babylon 5 was better than it's own bootleg series). SG-1 Was more of a Dumb fun kinda show, I'd rather compare it to the original Battlestart Galactica.
I also submit that one of the chief strengths the Cylons were counting on was superior communications. When you can disperse orders at the speed of light across a theater of battle, you probably have a distinct advantage against those who have to speak to communicate.
Remember that episode; i think it was called 44. The cylons kept pursuing the fleet pushing the fleet to exhaustion.. they had the means to destroy the Galactica, but stopped because they had a plan called let's make money by writing great episodes and selling merchandise. Look, we are still talking about it after all these years.
Apollo shot down the Olympic Carrier which was tracking the fleet for the Cylons before it could suicide nuke the rest of the ships. Had he hesitated, the chase would have likely ended right then and there.
You raise some interesting points, though seemingly fail to understand that the design of the Basestar is likely years in the making and as you say, designed for a particular purpose overall (the destruction of the Twelve Colonies) which it acquitted itself admirably. It's able to act outside those design perimeters, though less effectively. That's the way with any ship in well-written science fiction. The Basestar isn't a Mary Sue - which it sounds like you want - it's a purpose-built warcraft that in chasing the Galactica and the fleet is operating in ways outside it's original design perimeters (it appears more like a mobile weapons platform. Which is to say it warps into position and either unleashes it's ballistic weapons or Raiders, kind of like an aircraft carrier). Changing designs of any massive craft takes time, which in the middle of a conflict is perhaps not the best way to spend one's resources (especially when you have the benefit of seemingly limitless numbers and an enemy on the run). And as far as point defense goes, that's the entire point of having waves of Raiders available to defend the mothership, especially considering that most opponents would either be overwhelmed by the Raiders combined with the Basestar's ballistic weapons if they stay and fight.
Well. the main argument isn't that the Basestar is inadequate for the job. The basestars were designed to simultaneously devastate twelve planets with nuclear missiles, then obliterate a crippled and almost defenceless navy. They did a perfect job. The issue is that the Cylons (since they're machines) had a myopic state of mind, and so they built ONLY basetars. They didn't plan for contingencies or any sort of flexibility. As a result, they had no ships capable of actually matching battlestars when the need arose. It's a flaw, but I see it as part of who the Cylons are. They are, despite everything, still machines. They still have the limitations of machines.
@@Cailus3542 Sure, because they had only one mission. They were machines, not psychic. And if their plan had worked as planned - keep in mind the Galactica was an older ship in the process of being mothballed (made into a museum) which was the only reason it survived (it had none of the interlinked computer networks that would have made it vulnerable to the Cylon attack) - then there would be no need to build ships to defend against Battlestars because there would be none remaining. Off the top of my head I don't recall how the Pegasus survived the initial onslaught though I think they just lucked out and happened to be away at the time (in fact, I'm not quite sure the show explained how it was able to not be effected by the Cylon's attack on mainframe computers though later in the show this method of infiltration seems to have been largely abandoned). Flexibility is only required when you're likely to not accomplish your goals by force and by all rights the Cylons should have slaughtered (and for the most part, did) the Colonial forces. As I said there was literally no reason to change their tactics because they wiped out something like 98% (which is actually more like 99% because as I said no one intended the Galactica to be used as a combat vessel because it was being mothballed). With results like those changing your tactics is not only insane, it's something a successful invasion force would NEVER do.
@@screenPhiles If I remember right the Pegasus was on dock just starting the process of maintenance, having all computers offline when the attack happened. It was also why they forcibly recruited civilians of surviving civilian ships, since many crewmembers had already left the ship for the planned maintenance, leaving the Pegasus short staffed when it made it's emergency escape.
@@Kaefer1973 I need to watch it again because I don't think that's the case. If I recall the Pegasus was never at the Scorpio ship yards in the first place, which was how it was able to avoid destruction. I also don't recall them enlisting civilians though they did cannibalize civilian ships (which also doesn't quite makes sense because the Pegasus had foundries, all they needed was raw material, which could have been mined from any asteroid/asteroid belt they stumbled upon).
@@screenPhiles They most certainly force recruited civilians, I'm sure about that, I'm not sure if they did any retconning for their mini series though, but in the main series their forcefull drafting was definitively a topic.
This is made all the more puzzling when you look at the final assault on the singularity base. _That_ Cylon base had tons of ballistic weapons, and they kicked the snot out of the Galactica.
The depressing thing is, the Cylons basically use modern military strategy for ships. Spam missiles and fighters and prey your ship never has to take a hit.
And the Battlestar design philosophy has been out of date since the HMS Prince of Wales was sunk by a few Japanese planes. BSG is very weird in that way.
@@piotrd.4850 So the HMS Prince and the KMS Bismark just self-destructed? The flagship of the German navy and the best battleship of the largest navy on Earth were destroyed without planes? The Yamato, the largest battleship in history was killed without planes? The Musashi, her sister ship was killed without carriers? The 4 best battleships of WW2 were killed by planes. Ships that were built with AA in mind. What kind of counter-historical stunt are you trying to pull here? If WW2 proved one thing, it was that planes>BBs.
@@hafor2846 Not that it applies to the anachronistic technology present in BSG, but the reason planes worked against BBs is because the latter couldn't reliably take the former down before it could do damage; the range on the AA was no better (and actually worse) than the range on the plane's weapons and the probability of a hit per shot was very low. Long-range RADAR, guided missiles, and lasers radically alter this dynamic; now it's the planes that are going to be getting shot before they can deliver a payload. The missile and laser a plane can carry are much smaller than what a ship can carry. We already have this problem with modern SAMs, it's why the USAF is eager to replace the easily targeted A10 with the much slipperier F-35 in the CAS role. All that being said, the passive armor of a BB is useless because the munitions themselves are so potent that the amount of passive armor you'd need to defend against them is overly cumbersome. It's all about active defense systems.
But modern naval warships still retain at least one deck gun and several CIWS, so they still have the option of artillery when the missiles fail. Hell guns may even make a comeback if railgun technology becomes practical.
Ballistic guns have crap range not to mention huge power requirements in space though which is why they used Raiders to deliver that kind of damage. It's more that the Basestars can't defend themselves because while they can be rebuilt, it's not like it can resurrect itself.
Fair point. Who controls the Cylon doctrine? Are there any models that would have the first inkling about correctly adapting? All evidence points to them being rather single minded, Cavil especially. And if he's the one basically controlling all the human models then the Cylon's stood no chance at fixing their tactics/doctrine throughout their pursuit of Galactica and her fleet.
As many have staited the posibility that new basestars where build holocause in mind not true hunting or slug fest battle that Colonials had in mind. There is other posible factor that limited the ship and tactical thinking of Cylons that they had limited pool of minds, lets think about it you have population estimated 20-40 milion but all of those people are split whit clones of 7-8 individuals hos baisick thinking and personalities is all ready set in stone, that limits new ideas and thinking out a box specialy as all desisions are made by voiting whit all 7-8 people how might not see your idea in the eye. The Cylons had put themselves in a picle as the people how run the system lack true military mind and khohesive desison maiking organ Calvin is just a control freak how laced many things for good leader.
... One: Please god get better english, or typo check better? Not sure since you managed individuals, but butchered "has" and "basic" immediately after Two: Nothing says the 7 or 8 Cylons are absolutely Rigid. As shown in the show VERY clearly, they are not clones exactly, just people running around with similar experiences and memories, and thus similar characters/personalities. And if they're cut off in some shape or form from the connection, they can deviate. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, and sometimes waaaaay off the deep fucking end. This is what makes the whole later part of BSG possible.
It doesn't justify scrapping all their older ships that had effective artillery and point defense though. The Cylons may have had a plan, but they clearly didn't comprehend the idea that no plan survives contact with the enemy. They literally had no contingency plan for the event any battlestars survived.
Galactica was constructed using steel while Cylon Basestars were constructed with some kind of dark paste that becomes hard once it dries?? So they snap in half all the time when hit in center junction with a few dozen missiles
Beautiful. If only the Cylon Rebels has even 1 Arachne class warship, the organic cylons would be wiped off the floor. Exaggeration, but not far from the truth. Arachne being the light warship of the 1st war Cylons, right?
or they used guardian basestar heavy used missile but had point defense gun's and heavy cannons as well. they just need to update the raider's to the new model
@@JM-Games That's the main focus of every show. You may as well stop watching everything. Honestly, it's not perfect but it's still one of the bes sci-fi series ever made.
@@MrBottlecapBill To some degree you are right, I get where you are coming from but some shows add plot convenience as a last resort, where it is hidden well and not used very often, this entire show is based around the fact that they have plot armor which is absurd.
I don't think their plan accounted for a Battlestar surviving. Or said Battlestar being described as "Literally too angry to die". Honestly, what the show could've done was go with the cumulative damage that peaked at the battle of New Caprica, resulting in the destruction of the Galactica. The Colonials would then shift over to Pegasus, an almost fully armed, armored, and functional Battlestar, possibly even renaming it the Galactica in memory of their fallen guardian.
I always found that hilarious. The Cylons were so worthless at trying to kill the Galactica that it DIED OF OLD AGE!
It's like playing Metal Gear Solid 3 and actually waiting a week or two before fighting The End, so that he just dies of old age instead of actually being a boss battle. Only you're actually fighting him and the fight takes so long that he dies anyway. Because you suck that bad at fighting. Somehow.
Well, ya need a story.. Then ya need an enemy you can beat.. Star Wars is just as ridiculous in comparaison.
@@PascalRibaux That doesn't mean that the enemy has to be retarded. The Cyclons despite spending all that time studying humans built a front-line capital ship that was countered PERFECTLY by battle star class ships.
Star Wars is different because the Emperor's ARROGANCE led to his defeat not rampaging idiocy.
@@Nidhoggrr
Arrogance, idiocy.. Potato patato. Once the story is written, you can find all the flaws you want that led to one sides defeat, even in real history.
So the story about the cylons was that they planed a mass extinction over a very long period of time resulting in a specific design of their capital ship being unsuited for pursuing and harassing a constantly fleeing/moving fleet. An adaptation takes time, then you got to build the new ship in a place that is suited for that and once finished, sent in poursuit of a fleet with unknown destination.
Cyclons thought to be immortal. They had time and resources. They thought, that when they harass the humans long enough, they will go down anyway. Call it arrogance..
@@PascalRibaux Except one leads to a good story and the other leads to plot holes because the cyclons had the time, resources, data and intelligence, so for them to come up with something so idiotic made no sense.
What mindless line of reasoning to just say that it's all the same anyway. Just because you cannot understand the nuance in how to write better plot doesn't make them the same.
God forbid you ever go near writing.
Cylon BaseStars were a complete success. They were designed to meet all requirements....all requirements of the plot.
Well the point was to find god and meaning, not eradicate human race
*pilot
hahahaha
Basestars = cutting edge ships.
Official designation: Cylon Plot Carrier
Name: USS Very Vulnerable
*Not a typo. Yes, Vulnerable. It was the star wars Empire that named their Star Destroyer "Venerable" a much more optimistic name 😁
Was gonna say the plot.
They do have a plan. The plan is missiles.
They didn't say it was a good plan
(seriously at least guide the missiles to strike from all angles instead of direct-firing them into the flak screen)
Guiding a missile in space around a curve isnt that easy. The missile would basically need to rotate 120° on full thrust to achieve that kind of turn, which would require a lot of fuel and reduce speed drastically.
Better yet, use bomb-pumped X-ray lasers, which don’t need to get close to do damage. Use David Weber’s example. They can just go around the flack field and detonate while aiming their lasers at the Galactica. Boom! No need to actually hit the hull.
or fire kinetic missiles wich instead of exploding would carry on until it hit the ship
How is it more difficult to make a guided missile than a fighter?
their superior ftl technology could also be weaponized by ftl jumping nukes directly into the colonial fleet
The Galactica hass finally been taken by metal fatigue
Cylon: Just according to plan
Actually, this flaw is realistic. They built these weapons for one purpose, so they wouldn't have built in extras. (They have to worry about scarce resources too!). They didn't expect to fight Galactica, so why build ships to do it? Remember history is full of similar mistakes. The US failed to deploy repeating rifles at the start of the Civil War; everyone in WWI failed to change tactics to take account of new weapons. So, it's not surprising that Cylons made a similar stupid mistake.
Sure, but they should have realized that sooner, and if anything stop jumping on the fleet while making some new artillery guns. They could probably salvage a bunch from destroyed battlestars around the colonies if anything. They wouldn't have needed that many really. It would have been enough to at least damage the Galactica, and maybe blow a couple civilian ships too.
The only innovation we see are the heavy freighter they used once... once.
That’s not to say that there were no attempts to make up for planning short comings. In ww1 all sides tried to adapt tactics and new weapons to the battle field. Sadly submachine guns, tanks, artillery and aircraft were not effective or their full potential was not realized.
You also must consider that nations can learn the wrong ideas from wars. For example, after ww1 America saw the trench fighting and came to the conclusion that infantry were still the main players on the battle field. It took pretty much all of world war 2 for nations to develop the concept of an armored assault supported by infantry and fire support.
A simple explanation is that the cylons did not have the means to get out an effective battlestar counter. Or they still thought they could run down the aging and isolated colonial fleet.
Just yesterday i watched a documentary about the Battle of Britain. While designing their aircraft the Nazis apparently did not value the range enough, so that they couldn't reach past London and even then could only spent about 10 minutes over London and then had to return to France, a major hurdle that they did not overcome.
Wait, repeating rifles in the civil war? No sir, I think you're talking about WW1?
@@jakeg3733 No, repeating rifles existed - they were offered to Lincoln whose generals said no (wasted ammo). Repeaters were intro'd near the end.
Galactica: "The Cylons _still_ haven't managed to kill me?
*Guess I'll die.*
command all computers shut down....the command line never said Galactica shut down...the thinking of a machine.
The burning toaster at the end was the best part 😆
Admiral J yes,
Me too had to rewind the Toaster Fire too funny and unexpected!
I'm offended at the racist content on this channel.
@@njmksr8686 yes, how dare they show material against Toasters!
Frakking toasters!
The BSG movie "The Plan" fills in some of the gaps in the first 2 seasons. Regarding the Cylons, particularly the ones hiding in the colonial fleet.
They really were completely unprepared for having to mop up a large organized group of survivors. For the most part, the infiltrators were just desperately winging it while trying to create a menacing facade.
+1 for the added humor value of the visual aides.
A few thoughts:
1. At least until the Cylon civil war and the loss of the hub, it's not clear that destroying Galactica was actually the goal of the model which was in many ways in control of the Cylons. A long, painful hounding chase until things fall apart or supplies run out seems more suited to Cavil's goal or punishing the 5.
2. While the show does a good job concealing this - the original cylon uprising and the skin jobs are not one and the same, and it's not surprising that Cavil and the others would ignore or look down on the tech used by those original cylons.
The galactica rotted away before they could destroy it. *FAIL OF THE CENTURY*
I disagree with Daniel's assessment on that point. If I remember correctly, BSG attacked a Cylon base in the last episodes of the series to rescue Hera Agathon. BSG rams the base and comes under heavy point defense weapons fire while the rescue team boards the base for the rescue. It is easy to believe that the hull of BSG took such a pounding that it weakened her hull to the point that Colonel Saul Tigh states, "She's broke her back. She'll never jump again."
Well don't forget it was also nuked in the miniseries (still amazed) and got quite a pounding during the evacuation of New Caprica in Exodus part 2. Galactica got her fair share of damage.
One of the reasons Galactica was taken on this dangerous mission was that she was already dying before that. The structual damage was already enourmous, and due to shortcuts in her construction (to get her into service as quick as possible during the first cylon war) and unfinished areas she recieved more and more damage from every FTL jump, to the point where out of nowhere giant cracks appeared in her strutural components. It was then decided by Admiral Adama that it would be better to abandon Galactica, let her die in peace and make the cylon basestar the new fleet flagship (after the cylon civil war one basestar teams up with the colonial fleet). Equipment, personal, weapons and fighters were already tranferred to the basestar when they recieved information about the colony and Hera being kept there by the cylons. They, they decide to try to rescure Hera, and use the Galactica for it. Adama even thought they would never come back from this mission. You are right that that last battle completly killed Galactica, but her structural damage was already severe before that and it would only have been a matter of weeks until the same effect would be there without the last battle.
xXNightDriverXx and even then she STILL managed to get her crew back to safety
You presuppose that this wasn´t the plan all the time.
The Cylons were for all intents and purposes an immortal race, only with a slow respawn rate. They could easily afford to play the slow game of wearing your enemy down. Eps 33, and Scare demonstrated this perfectly. Continued attacks wore the Colonials down, and wrecked their psyche, while with each death the Cylons grew better at fighting Colonials. This mentality did however backfire in the end when they lost the Resurrection Tech.
The Cylons did have a plan, destroy humanity at the 12 colonies and keep the survivors running until they died from exhaustion.
It said multiple times throughout the series, the Cylons are immortal machines, they could take unthinkable losses and simply resurrect. Over the course of the series, they probably lost twice as many shifts as the colonial fleet had if not more and didn’t think twice about it if it meant that they were able to take out a ship or two of humanity. Too them, it’s simply did not matter how long it took her how much life was lost, neither held any meaning to them.
When they lost the resurrection hub, everything changed however and arguably The need to restore resurrection, or embrace procreation became more important than wiping out humanity. In fact, if I recall after the hub was destroyed account there were no further major engagements between the two sides until the final battle at the colony.
This mentality, really explains almost all of the Cylon tactics used. The overreliance on missiles, the weapons platform approach versus actual battleship approach of the base stars, the swarm tactics of the raiders, all of it was geared towards rapid for strike and overwhelming with a rinse and repeat which can only be done with essentially with a strategy that uses unlimited resources and immortality.
Had the resurrection hub not been destroyed when it was, the colonial fleet would’ve found itself under the protection of the rebel base star far longer than it was.
It’s actually an amazing tactical error on the Cylons part that the hub wasn’t constantly guarded by its own fleet round the clock or parked in orbit of a black hole like the colony was. They lost the moment the hub went up.
To be fair its easy to forget how much of a successful first strike the fall of the colonies were, put quite simply the Resurrection hub and all subsequent victories always seemed to me to just be the underestimation of a small survivor group after you have effectively destroyed over 99% of their population and military facilities. Its like a group of french resistance fighters blowing up an oil facility in the heartland of Nazi Germany, you would not guard against it because you would never anticipate such an unlikely hood.
Did the entire Cylon race chase after the Galactica? What happen to all the Cylons back at the colonies and in their own space? You would think they would have established their own home world.
Fucktardickis even cavil acknowledged that the loss of the hub was the extinction of the cylon race.
The Cylon black hole base was already their "homeworld" As they are machines they dont really need a world with specific conditions or environments beyond non of the hazardous radiation that damages their circuits. Outside of visiting them for experimentation and anthropology they really did not need the worlds of the colonies.
Beyond that they essentially had all the necessary facilities for their continued existence already jumping around wherever they needed them. Their own space was predominantly just mining bases. The entirety of Cylon existence after the first war was spent building up to the second and dealing with the final five.
As for what happened after words the allot of the Cylons were destroyed in the civil war, those that remained afterwards were likely stranded or disconnected groups of Centurions and Basestars, they either kept doing what they were programmed to do and eventually broke down, or had the self awareness upgrade and figured out something else and bummed off to god knows where.
only the rebel's had self awareness and the survivor's of that faction out right admit that they where almost completely destroyed by the One faction in ambushes it's why they hit the Resurrection hub as the ones had taking all the Resurrection ships and needed Galactica to do so
As a new viewer, I'm honestly really liking this aspect of BSG. Too many sci-fi shows and movies treat their alien adversaries, especially robots, as logical, unstoppable forces of nature. While BSG certainly portrays the Cylons as deadly and effective in many situations, particularly in the destruction of the Twelve Colonies, they have significant flaws in terms of arrogance and failure to adapt to a changing situation. It's like they spent so long planning for one, specific attack that they didn't even think about contingencies -- in essence, they put all of their eggs in one basket and paid the price throughout the rest of the show.
Agree. If you observe Deep Mind's artificial intelligence (AlphaStar - a StarCraft 2 AI Player), you will notice some strengths and weaknesses in relation to human players. If your small army (with a transport ship) is surrounded by a large enemy army, you should sacrifice the army and kill as much as you can. AlfaStar puts them in the transport ships and again loses the army by fleeing (the army cannot fire from the transport ships) without trying to kill even a unit of the enemy army (We are talking about a situation where it is clear to a person that you cannot escape on the ground or by air).
It is true that we cannot compare Deepmind's Alfastar with the Super advanced Cylons, but it can also be a good example of the difference between the human thinking and that of the artificial intelligence.
The survivors of the 12 colonies rippled throughout all the Cylon like an error, and it affected all of them, that later caused the system to break and lead to an unclearable error, that caused the jamming single to reactive the 4/5 and that broke the Cylons logic systems and then it was Cylon against Cylon, one error boke the entire society if you can call it that. The question was are they alive, or are they just real-life, like robot that feels alive?
NO sci fi shows and movies actually have good enemies, else the "good guys" and therefor the main characters would lose easily lose because they are humans and have emotions and no real intelligence.
1 robot should be able to kill millions of people because it reacts faster and sees in 360 degrees and can dodge bullets and any situation it could go into where it could be tricked it will just ignore. exist for 1ms in its vision and you instantly perish. tanks cant hit it. planes cant shoot it. mines will be predicted. it will punch through walls and jump between buildings.
1 small AI "ship" with no crew interior nonsense would be able to destroy galactica by just drilling into it and nuking it after dodging its giant guns and shooting down all their vipers by turning faster than them. of course if this happened starbuck would get super powers and float in space with a magic laser then go back to being normal.
@@jasonissel217 One of the major points of the show is that they ARE alive, and the reason for the whole conflict was humanity's lack of recognition of that single fact
Just as many sci-fi shows and movies have illogical, stupid enemies who repeatedly hand what should be easy victories for them to the scruffy underdog good guys on a silver platter by being almost comically underprepared for sometimes not even very creative, if still unconventional tactics. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the reverse is true: Too many stories in general have incompetent villains who create their own weaknesses and consistently fail to adapt to cover them up in time. The Empire in Star Wars, most of the enemy factions in Stargate, the Covenant and Banished (At least in ground engagements) in Halo, and the Cylons in both versions of BSG are all glaring examples of the exact opposite problem to the one you've described. For a rather notable example from novels, look at the Race from Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series. While these antagonistic factions don't necessarily have _zero_ adaptability, they are not flexible enough, or quick enough to change in order to avoid being outsmarted by their otherwise weaker opponents.
I think the new Basestars were designed to fight disabled enemies that could not shoot back. That would make the backdoor in Baltars CNP actually crucial to the success of the invasion of the Colonies instead of being an added bonus.
An analysis of the battle tactics used by the cylons during the invasion and how it might have gone had the Colonial fleet not introduced the new program (or if the backdoor had failed) would be interesting.
Tezunegari It's been said that colonials had a) Better ships and b) they gad a lot of them. Ithink that if they could fight, they would win.
I think they shortly address this in the show, with one Cylon(I think a Six) stating to Gaius Baltar that there was no way the Cylons would have won a direct engagement with Colonial Fleet. According to the Cylons this was because they (the Cylons) were inherently more peaceful, weird as that may sound. It probably had to do more with the fact that they couldn't learn from their military mistakes, because the lack of consequenses for losing were negligible due to resurrection technology.
It sounds like it would have been a complete curbstomp of the Cylon fleet if the Colonial Fleet had been at full strength (even allowing for some losses due to the surprise attack), but without knowing where the Cylon base of operations was, the Cylons could retreat 'beyond the red line' and regroup to consider their options.
TheOneWhoMightBe There's no doubt that the Colonials would agressively push out in all directions looking for the Cylon Home world. They might also have the impetus to kick their fleet production into overdrive so they can accomplish just that.
the cylons would have never won in a direct engagement the colonial had 120 active battlestar's with 30 to 40 of which are the large Jupiter and Mercury classes. the rest where Valkyrie's which where said to relied on missile much more then any other colonial warship and even then it's mostly that it's 33 heavy gun's could fire missile as well as normal rounds of the colonials. who also had a unknown number of other warships ( as well as the fleet boneyard) all of which relied on powerful gun's with strong flak and point defence systems alongside heavy armour with Viper support to protect their ships the Cylon mass raider and missile strategy with almost no point defense gun's or any other weapons and thin but slowly regenerative armour is just about the worst thing they could use ageist them. the only advantage they would have is that the colonial's don't know where they are.they have better ftl( more energy effective with better computers to calculate jump's) resurrection and spy's that the human's don't know of but it's unlikely to stay that way when the war starts up. and Adar will have no choice but to fall to the military's demands unless he want's killed by his own people ( he was already no liked by the military's and most other department's)
They never had a plan.
No, really. Ron Moore has said in a number of interviews that the line was only included in the opening of the show because David Eick thought it sounded cool.
"We have a plan, right?"
"Of course we have a plan!"
Thinking: Shit, we don't have a plan.
The writers never had a plan, that's the sad part. And why the story fizzled into a silly, disappointing ending with much left unexplained and probably unexplainable.
@@ian_b Ron Moore said they only planned 10 episodes ahead. Babylon 5 on the other hand was written with a grand plan with adjustments along the way due to things like a lead actor suffering a mental illness and an other having drug addiction.
That ending gave me cancer, such a shame. I loved it for the most part, but they ran out of ideas and steam. Deep Space 9 and Babylon this was not, so say we all
So it's just like Lost. But in space.
omg it's Lost In Space
**Builds a ship for war**
**Doesn't put guns on it**
Wouldn't be the first time a military totally misjudged how the newest war would be fought. In Vietnam, missile tech was seen as such a game changer that the hot new F-4 Phantom shipped without an internal gun and their pilots hated it.
@@alanwake5239 in an age of lock on air to air missiles, but before significant ECM advances, guns on a fighter seemed obsolete. Especially because most bullets and shells fired from an aircraft at an aircraft will miss. It was seen as a waste of bullets, which it kind of was. Loading a plane down with ammo that will most likely miss was seen as an inefficient use of a plane’s carrying capacity. Better aiming and flight control systems developed later made fighters with guns more efficient with their bullets.
Guns are terrible for space combat. In space, a shell can't do anything a missile of similar mass cannot do, and the missile does many things better. If you do happen to hit a large missile, most of the fragments would just continue to travel in a straight line and impact the target anyway. The missile can go faster and hit harder since it accelerates not only in a barrel, but during the intervening travel. They were trying to keep it more "realistic" and not using science fiction weaponry like plasma bolts or ammunition traveling at 90% light speed.
The biggest issue was all the tiny little explosive missiles they fired. If they had used 20 ton kinetic warheads (big balls of iron) they would have smashed the Galactica apart.
@@davidmoore1880 "If they had used 20 ton kinetic warheads (big balls of iron) they would have smashed the Galactica apart."
Space shotguns on a grand scale.
@@davidmoore1880 I would disagree... a lot. Kinetic energy is a real killer. Especially in space where there's none of that pesky friction to slow down your shots.
Inability to adapt was also the weakness of the Cylons in the 1978 Battlestar Galactica. They were in a stalemate for 1000 years and only human treachery brought about any progress, and then they were in a stalemate against just one ship.
Shade was thusly thrown.
The flaw wasn't on the ships, but on the cylons themselves. They underestimated their enemies. That's the biggest and dumbest mistake you can commit in times of war.
Strange: there are a lot of mistakes in wars of the earth history, where it was the other way around: they thought, that the enemy was way stronger. And lost because of that. Search for "empty fort strategy". Rommel won this way in africa by building fake tanks, so that the British thought him way stronger, as he really was. To make fun of some power because of having underestimate or overestimate the enemy shows me, that you have absolutely no idea of any form of warfare.
you think that through out the entire time they were attacking the galactica, and FAILING that maybe they should try something other then just missiles? its one thing to underestimate your opponent, another but similar thing to overestimate yourself, but to fail to adapt after countless failures is just incompetent
@@baldurkukukari4051 The idea is to never let the enemy know how strong you are in difference locations.
So you want to seem stronger in some places and weaker in others, that way (hopefully) the enemy won't attack your weak points, but might fall into a trap that completely wrecks their forces.
In space it might be harder to pull off than just having inflatable tanks, etc, but it still might be possible.
They were effectively children...
Your humanizing machines, computers type a command and it happens, when the command errors, then the computer can't clear the error, then it keeps looping. Command All colonies to be nuked from orbit, Command virus tells all battlestars to shut down...error; error two battlestars survived....command virus shut down all battlestars, error, error, battlestars still active. That will keep going until the command line is changed, or the Cylons destroy themselves from an unclearlable error. Which is exactly what happened.
You forgot a crucial advantage of the Colonials.
*PLOT ARMOR*
Ehm ehm Pegasus ehm...
The show is called Battlestar Galactica not Pegasus.
Highgrounder: The Pegasus is a perfect example of how strong Galactica's plot armor was. Despite technically being the superior ship the Pegasus was sacrificed to save the Galactica. I think Eckhart's Ladder's channel even did a video comparing the plot armor of the lead ships from various sci-fi IPs and decided Galactica's was the strongest.
It so thick it thick as one battleship can be
The ultimate weapon in the universe
Cylon Centurion: My lord, I have a plan. A cunning plan that cannot fail.
- Does it involve a turnip?
- Yes.
Baldrick is a cylon.. confirmed!
Baldrick would make agreat Cylon😂😂😂
The reason for this is simple. They were never meant to fight battlestars. Basestars are specifically designed for planetary siege. They jump in, release raiders to keep defenders busy and nuke the living shit out of the planet.
Even if the entire colonial military fleet survived, it would be useless, with no colonies, shipyards or industry to back them up. The only thing Cylons had to do is to be around so they can nuke any base the fleet tries to build. The battlestars would eventually fall apart from wear. Which is precisely what happened.
yeah sure but it wont take long for people to realise that basestars are shit and they should send fleets hunting them down. Area denial only works when it cant be chased off so easily.
@@Queue3612 Like I said, basestars are specifically designed for blitzkrieg (or hit&run) planetary bombardment. Not area denial.
If basestar attacks you, your planet/base will be nuked into oblivion before you penetrate the fleet of raiders and get to the basestar.
At that point, the basestar can just retreat, because it accomplished its mission of crippling your supply chain.
@@KohuGaly but galactica ships can fight off 2 or 3 at a time and win. all you need to do si chase off the basestars and they cant do their job.
all the cylons bring are basestars and as such are only capable of planetary bombardment, that is all.
@@KohuGaly It's not unbelievable that Cylons would build such weapons for planetary bombardment. The unbelievable or implausible part is that they build nothing else and continue to use basestars against the Galactica for 5 years without learning something.
Totally agree. The cylon plan put their money behind a 1) Infiltration for sabotage/reconnaissance 2) Universally-distributed cyberattack 3) Massive initial strike, shock, and awe.
The Baseships weren’t designed for war. They were designed for genocide. Hunting down a battlestar commanded by the best tactical strategist ever wasn’t part of the plan.
Yup, their entire fleet hinged on the battle tactic of pearl harbor-ing your enemy into defeat.
And to be fair, it worked. The hack succeeded, and they wiped out humanity, save for those 40.000 running away.
But there isn't a single doubt in my mind that the Cylons would've been curb-stomped by the colonials if the hack failed.
@@denneledoe873 That's pretty much what the Cylons were thinking. They knew they would lose a war of attrition, even with resurrection technology, so they had to win in 1 strike.
@@HelghastStalker Which bothers me because the Colonials are supposed to have anywhere from 120 to 240 Battlestars of which only 2 survived due to glitches or being hardened. That makes no sense to network the new generation if the Cylons are still out there and the last season plus Blood & Chrome heavily implies the Cylons were winning the first war until the Final Five convinced them to agree to an armistice.
Even if the Cylons were just hacking their way to win in the first war, it would suggest the Cylons have figured out how to make more than a bunch of aircraft missile spam carriers.
@@Taospark It implies, but doesn't outright state they were winning. Actually, I'd suggest it was more of a case that the Colonials didn't really know how good (or bad) the Cylons were actually doing during the first war. They just assumed the Cylons were doing good, but for all we know the Cylons were the ones on the verge of defeat.
That having been said, the Cylons that were fighting Humanity during the first war are not the same as the ones we saw during the second war. And let's face it, Cylon technology from the first war had its roots in Colonial technology, and Cavil hated anything that reminded him of humanity.
So my theory's that Cavil refused to run with anything that would admit the Colonials might be right, even such a small way as "Their way of fighting IS solid".
@@HelghastStalker That would make sense because the base ships are these nimble battleships with way more firepower and fighters.
Also, the original Cylons probably didn't bother building ships so much as just floating in space until they could board a battlestar and make their way to aft damage control like Adama recalls.
It's basically free battlestars or at least munitions without having to build warships from scratch like the Colonials did mid-war.
If we go with the mention that the Colonials had 120-240 Battlestars before the second war, then Cavil's Basestars had no chance unless they could hack the Colonial ships.
"They have a plan"
*Ballistic weapons not included
Seth90TOF No one said it was a good plan.
In the words of Black Adder: "Would that be the plan to continue with total slaughter until everyone's dead except Field Marshal Haig, Lady Haig and their tortoise, Alan?"
@@tanith117
How did you know that, that's classified information
@Maintenance Renegade I've always joked that Battlestar Galactictica should have been called "Lost in Space."
"They have a plan" - but the writers have no idea what it is...
@@RichFreeman How to make a Cylon break: "The following statement is true... They have a plan."
The Cylon will break, because it's a robot confronted by a paradox.
I would like to see a comparison between the Cylon Baseships of the 1978 series vs the Cylon Basestars of the 2004 series, detailing the differences in size, weapons, and Raider compliments.
Failed to mention Pegasus, Mercury class Battlestar that can take on multiple baseships and jam inbound missiles. Galactica actually had a difficult time defending itself. Basestars were dependent on electronic warfare and far range warfare so if they brawled point blank they were fucked.
To be fair, the Galactica has graetly reduced combat abilities at the time. she was meant to be scrapped and many guns and armor plates were already removed, when the show starts. During her prime time, those new basestars woudln´t stand a chance.
The new basestars look and act like glass cannons, while the old basestars are more than a serious threat even to a fully armed battlestar in its prime time.
Galactica was to become a museum. That's why one of the flight pods is sealed off and filled with exhibits of vipers and stuff from the first war.
It makes no sense to me why they removed guns and armor, but they did. If you watch Blood and Chrome, you see that in full fighting trim Galactica was an absolute monster- the entire topside was covered in heavy cannons and there was no exposed hull ribbing. If *that* ship was there during the exodus, things would have been different.
wll1500 It actually makes a LOT of sense for multiple reasons. One: Why would you waste a perfectly good beast of an arsenal on an aging, outdated ship that wont even be used anymore when you can strap it to a shiny new ship and get more use out of it, or at least break it down for parts? The Romans and those afterwards often broke down ruined buildings for their materials, often to build something else nearby out of those same reclaimed parts.
Two: Security Risks. Keeping a fully functioning, or at least mostly functioning arsenal of weapons on a warship, one that is VERY easily accessed by most civilians, could likely lead to a hijack and following rampage. You do not want a fully armed beast of a warship you thought was out of the picture suddenly mowing your fleets down, or worse.
As was mentioned before, the Galactica was viewed as an outdated relic that had no use compared to the more modern, far more advanced ships of that day. Just because a ship is effective 40 or so years ago does NOT mean it shall remain as effective in the present, especially if other ships outclass it in technology by far.
@@higueraft571 lol what? As part of the decommissioning they dumped all the munitions. That's why they had to stop by Ragnar. Civilians could have hijacked a ship with no ammo I guess. Plus, Galacticas guns and armor were as old as the ship itself. I don't think they would have robbed them for use on another ship.
@@wll1500 yeah new guns had a 25% faster fire rate and more powerful rounds that where also faster
"We are Gods chosen!"
"You failed so much the enemy literally gave up out of pity towards you."
Aryan Suebian And of course there’s an anti-Semitic meme. I mean, why wouldn’t there be?
@Maintenance Renegade the joos
I don't see how this is in any way antisemitic lol
@@deadeyecpt.7765 it can be intrepreted to refer to the Jews lol. also the persons first name had 'aryan' in it lol
@@Warsie That's stretching it though.
I absolutely LOVE the distinct "Hitchhikkers' Guide to the Galaxy" vibe in this video! If you ever get the urge to include that vibe again, please indulge!
".....Seems unbecoming of a species that so often reminds us that they "Have a Plan"
and shows a background of a toaster on fire.
i'm dying lol
In universe I think it shows part of the difference between the leadership of the synthetic human cylons and the purely robotic cyclons. As the nature of the Cylon civilization changed so did their outlook and capacity to adapt.
The destruction of the cylon base around the black hole due to nuclear missile impacts is probably the best example of such said bad tactics. Awesome video, as always.
Been waiting for this :D I guess the cylons where 100% dependent on wiping out all humans in the first attack instead of actual ship to ship combat which ended poorly against the Galatica a ship designed to combat cylon vessels of stronger design in the first cylon war. Because lets be honest. The first war cylon vessels based of colonial design where better at fighting colonial ships than the new ships .
They got within an inch of succeeding though. All but 2 basestars were wiped out, all but 10K humans were subjugated. In that respect, the Basestar was a HUGE success. It was never designed to fight Battlestars in protracted fights.
"The Galactica literally rotted away before the Cylons could destroy it!" - Ouch, that was a good toaster burn.
maybe someone should turn the Cylons into something more useful, like a toaster or a washing machine...
@@jasonissel217 Yes, that was a common joke in the series that Cylons are called "toasters" ;-)
*sees title; rubs hands*
"Oh boi dis gon be gud"
Yup. Same feeling here.
If the Cylon's weapons are too perfect, there would be no series to watch on the TV after one season 😉
Still lazy design
they dont need to be perfect, they just need to work well enough to justify tension.
@ilove bigbrother
Examples of such "coherent and logical enemies/weapon design and long successful stories"?
If their logic is perfect, they cannot fail continuously. That's not ... logic. QED
Even the field by boosting the Galactica's defense instead of making dumb fights
@@vukkulvar9769
I'm sorry but I'm unsure what you're referring to. Which season which episode?
If one of the flaws isn't "Marc and his stupid FTL rams" I will be thoroughly surprised.
Vice-Admiral Holdo: FTL rams? I'll have to try that sometime!
@@SamaritanPrime Tyrol: Admiral Holdo, it is with regret I inform you that our FTL on this show is instantaneous point-to-point jumps. There's no such thing as ramming and it's impossible to appear inside another ship.
Buuuuuuuuuut.....feel free to FTL inside a mountain if you feel like it.
@@void2258 didn't stop her in the Star Wars universe where FTL was subspace tunneling and objects in subspace disintegrate on overlap with no realspace effect.
@@BigTylt Note that they FTLed without any overlapping matter. Appearing harmlessly inside a large vessel would defeat the point of a Holdo Maneuver.
I always interpreted the Galactica's death as just having been blown up and shot and patched together over and over so many times and doing so many jumps it finally gave up. Also the Adama Manoeuvre. That couldn't have been good for it.
You're probably my favourite character in the show, Mr. Nice Gaius.
They DO have a plan. It's just a terrible one.
I really appreciate your ability to see the flaws and shortcoming even in something you love and enjoy. this quality is rarely seen.
Basic ballistic weaponry can also be mitigated with flak or other point defense depending on the range of the engagement. The farther out the attacking ship the greater the chance that its attack will be intercepted by countermeasures.
Another downside to balistic weaponry is that it can only fire in straight lines, a shell, once fired, can't maneuver. So, if your target is reasonably maneuverable guns will have a hard time hitting its target. A missile, on the other hand, can be designed to track its target and follow every move it makes until it runs out of fuel. You can also fire missiles from a lot farther away than a gun by simply launching them ballistically and have them simply coast in (since there's no drage to slow them down) until a certain point before turning on their engines.
Phil Hsueh so then use railguns. A battlestar mounted railgun isn’t going to be dodged by another battlestar
the problem with that is the colonials main warship, the battlestar, is far from what you would call "reasonably maneuverable."
There's a lot that can be said for big dumb slugs flying at high speed through space. first of which is that you'd have to hit it with enough energy to change it's deflection. That means flak might ding it up and slow it down, but it isn't going to shred slugs apart the way it does to missiles and fighters.
Second point is that just because it's not a missile, doesn't mean it's not guided. A simple RCS can't propel a slug fast enough to do anything, but it can error correct over time. Hell even a flywheel on a gimbal can steer a projectile.
Last is that the reload time would be negligible. Suddenly you're firing these guided 20 meter long kinetic impactors a fraction of the speed of light like a machine gun. And your only limitation is how fast you can bleed off heat.
Just put a maneuvering pod on the shells.
Or, better yet: Use kinetic kill vehicles. Even if they get intercepted by countermeasures, there's a good chance they'll do damage.
To be fair, I had the impression that part of the reason that final jump killed Galactica was because she had taken such a beating from the *artillery* systems mounted on the Colony. But also the metal rot lol
Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. I've seen that clip. The colony had all the PDWs and such that the base ships lacked.
well they did trash that battlestar against planetary gravity - let's not forget that... that was something they werent designed to do.
Another aspect is that the colonial Battlestar is a double-edged sword for the Cylons. Notice how they *always* engage side on like two ships at broadside. To me, this is because despite the disadvantage of facing the Battlestars flak fields. The Cylons never position their ships in front of the Galactica or Pegasus, due to their main batteries facing forward. To engage in this would be suicide. We see that when Lee Adama destroys a Baseship in seconds with the pegasuses main battery at the exodus of New Caprica.
It seems like the Cylons put all their cards in initially destroying the 12 Colonies and their defenders in the initial attack. And didn't consider the possibility of any meaningful counterattacks or surviving warships.
all and all that plan was pretty successful too.
exactly 2 military vessels survive and both of then do it through sheer blind luck. the Pegasus just so happened to have had its entire computer systems underoing maintenance and easily could have jumped itself into a star, and had the Cylons attacked litterally an hour later Galactica would have been a completely useless museum. no one would expect the USS Consitution to Duke it out with a modern Zumwalt Class.
@@kazmark_gl8652 USS Constitution would fk that stupid Zumwalt Class up
@@TWEAKLET Old Ironsides wouldn't do much more than dent the side of the Zumwalt's superstructure before getting shredded by the 5-inch gun.
That being said, a better comparison would be the USS North Carolina in her final refit from 1945 facing the Nuclear Battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy as he currently stands right now .
They had infiltrators on both battlestars and immortal Raiders to run them down as more survivors kept dying. The chase just strained their complete lack of civilization, culture, or determination creating religious then political schisms until one side joined the Colonials to blow their homebase to hell.
@@Taospark The problem is that Cavil was the one who engineered the war, and he didn't actually have a plan for "After We Win", since...well, he was throwing (as TV tropes put it) a Galactic-sized Temper Tantrum against his creators.
He just wanted his creators and Humanity dead, and worry about literally EVERYTHING ELSE later. Then later came, and his lack of foresight bit him in the ass hardcore.
love the whole Templin voice bar thing your doing, keep it up spacedock!
It is interesting to note that the Hierarchy of the Cyclons also had Wardens, those that wanted to wait and take a measured, thorough approach and meticulous approach, to the annihilation of the Human Species, and the Crusaders, who were chomping at the bit to END the Humans As Fast As Possible. Had the Wardens won out, they very well may have wiped out Humanity by building contingencies into the Battle Plans.
Cylons should have kept the Basestar variant from Blood & Chrome - it had guns, missiles, lots of Raiders, and visually seemed to be armored. BTW, how about a comparison of 4 Basestar variants? Original, Blood&Chrome Variant, Guardians Variant and the new one?
Basestars aren't useless; They're pretty damn good at their single purpose: Wiping out humanity based on 12 planets in a nuclear holocaust, and cyberwarfare. The problem was that they didn't expect anything capable of fleeing to survive. And lets face it, the only reason the Galactica survived to New Earth was through divine intervention (read: extremely thick plot armor). If three basestars had jumped into the middle of the fleet like they did when the rebel basestar did when the Demetrius had FTL problems, they could have launched nukes against half of the fleet before Adama even order an alert. That didn't happen, somehow, despite having precise tracking information from the Olympic Carrier for the first couple of days, when they were still in the Cyrannus system with plenty of support to blow the fleet out of the sky.
I always was so annoyed by how the Basestars were designed. Such a joke. Think about it, if the battlestars aimed for that pylon where it connects the Y arms, It would just split in two and it would be useless already. If Gaius Baltar wasn't such an idiot, the Colonial Fleet would have whipped the Cylons off the floor with their Pegasus-class battlestars and Viper MKVII.
Another example would have been the Battle of Ragnar Anchorage, 3 modernized basestars versus a 40 year old battlestar and the battlestar managed to fend off the three basestars and escaped relatively unscathed. Battle of the Resurrection Ship, two battlestars, old and new, versus two basestars and completely wiped the floor on them. Hardly a competition.
Basestars would be pretty good carriers if they actually used them like carriers instead of constantly closing the distance with fraking battlestars. In the series, Galactica was never able to simply defeat the enemy fighter swarm, they always won by taking out the command ships or other plot devices like viruses. Carriers need escorts though.
Plus in the BSG universe if you're about to be overwhelmed by fighters you can usually just FTL away, which is another flaw in not having immediate, decisive firepower through use of guns
Most sci fi writers also don't understand why missiles, which base stars have plenty, are superior to fighters. Lower mass , able to pull higher Gs for more maneuver ability.
@@Kay0Bot "If a cylon gets a missile lock on you, get into a high G turn, call to your wingman to shoot it down, try to get something between you and it and don't forget to pray" - Starbuck.
@ZonTheDon ... A missle has a significantly higher chance of hitting it's target then an unguided mass with a set velocity traveling in one vector.
@ZonTheDon what's your point? That missiles aren't a guarantee hit?
That statement is true for anything...depends on how far you get into physics and probability.
My point is in space a guided missile is better option than an unguided projectiles projectiles. That's actually true in our current tech on earth.
To their credit, Galactica was built for her job. She’s practically a a baby war star (which scales to infinity class super ships like in halo)
And to the cylons, only number 1 wanted war and used subterfuge to get it. Presses the question, did the subterfuge come before or after new base stars?
I noticed this whilst playing deadlock using the Argos basestar (or even the regular basestar to some degree), they just can't hold up against battlestars. The Cylons need a battlestar equivalent, something durable and hard hitting but not reliant on missiles.
I think, the biggest (balancing) issue in Deadlock is, that firing up your flakfield disables a Battlestars side-guns...
Which are technically classified as point-defense!!
Activating your Flak should deactivate your top Battlestar-Artillery (or at leas drastically reduce its effect).
The port- and starboard-guns may switch in a defensive-mode for additional accuracy for reduced range!!
Let's not forget that a very significant part in the Cylon's battle doctrine was being able to hack and shut down any and all Colonial craft. If that were possible with all Colonial ships (which is close to 100% of them, except the Galactica of course) then the Cylons wouldn't need to worry much about defensive measures.
The opening montage shows a tour guide describing this - that Galactica was deliberately built primitive to be unhackable - and deriding it in the same breath. Then Baltar happens...
They had a plan, no one said it was a good plan...
by your command
The Cylon plan reminds me of the US Air Force's plan in Vietnam. Removing guns from aircraft and becoming dependent on missiles. So yes, I can see why the Cylons would think this is a sound tactic. Also, even after realizing their mistake, they were pursuing an evading fleet, and they couldn't exactly pull ships and send them to be refitted.
That was not "the plan in Vietnam". The problem is that the US had long since been moving toward all-missile fighters because it expected to fight a very different war - an open nuclear shooting war against incoming enemy bombers that didn't require politically motivated visual ID. Early missiles had terrible reliability and performance issues, and taking them into close high-G dogfights, catapulting them repeatedly off the deck and landing back on with them unfired over and over again (and in tropical conditions too, with salt-spray issues for the carriers) likewise didn't help. They were being asked to fight a war they hadn't been designed for.
They have a plan. Plans don't survive contact with the enemy though.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy, which is why you need multiple plans and contigencies along with the ability and confidence to switch between and adapt these plans.
They had a plan, they never said it was a good one
I haven't seen more than the first few episodes, but from what you've said, I this the Cylons' problem was that they had a plan that they refused to deviate from. When unexpected things like Galactica surviving happened they failed to adapt their philosophy and their ships to the new reality.
That toaster at the end must have been their "Imperious Leader"
I think the basestars were designed to suit a particular purpose and they performed very well in that regard. I think the first battle of the series gives a very good indication of how the Cylons would have fought if the plan had failed. They simply sit back and allow their missiles to bombard a Battlestar at range while their raiders take care of the vipers before moving onto the Battlestar as well. If I remember correctly, the Galactica was actually hit by a few missiles in that engagement. So if we assume that the Cylon strategy for the baseships is long range bombardment and raider support, their design makes sense. The long arms for multiple missile batteries and a central section capable of deploying dozens if not over a hundred raiders as once, would allow them to quickly overwhelm a Battlestar.
I think the ballistic weapon argument is difficult to make for two reasons. Firstly, if the Cylons favoured long range bombardment, there’s a chance that a Battlestar could simply move out of the way before the projectile arrived, a missile (depending on its type) can be controlled and redirected to wherever the Battlestar is. Secondly, there’s no guarantee that Galactica’s flak field would not have destroyed it like the missiles. The projectiles the battlestars use seem to be quite slow moving, giving the flak field ample opportunity to destroy or deflect the round (if used by the Cylons).
Finally, I think that we missed out in a sense with BSG. I love the series but I’d have loved to have seen the long range bombardment strategy of the Cylons face off against the close with the enemy strategy of the Colonials. We get snippets of this like with the battle of the resurrection ship or the battle where Apollo takes control of Pegasus but seeing a full fleet engagement start to finish would have been amazing.
Tecnically the BaseStars do have a defense ... in the battle of the hub you can see they use missiles to intercept other incoming missiles.. and those missiles seem to behave like antiaircraft cluster flak.. exploding and expanding snaprel to intercept incoming warheads.. that however probably has little efficiency against the Galactical gauss guns
@@piotrd.4850
Unsure how those would work in space since combustion in the near vacuum would be next to impossible.
I always thought they were a sort of railgun, just far slower than what we would think a sci-fi railgun slug should be. (Around the speed or only a few times faster than conventional artillery in the real world.)
Marrqi7 wini just for reference, modern propellants have their own oxidizer, so combustion would not be a problem.
They did not plan for the BSG. Considering nearly ever Battlestar were destroyed in the opening salvo. The Pegasus only escaped by doing a blind jump. So really it was a good design for their plans.
They must not have considered the Galactica a factor in the upcoming conflict, relying wholly on their electronic subversion to eliminate any flak systems.
Even so, during one of the episodes (no spoilers) Adama said they can't hold off 3 Basestars.
Even with the Flak Shield, there are times when missiles do get through and detonate.
Two notes:
1) IRL, changing tactics and more importantly developing new weaponry needed to change those tactics is time consuming, and requires a massive investment of industry and manpower, so it's not really remarkable that, once the Cylons' basic error was revealied, they didn't have enough time to fix it. You see this in WW2, where the Axis was largely unable to change their tactics or adapt to new situations, whereas US forces - having ludicrously massive testing and construction facilities, and money being literally no object - were able to adapt over the course of the war, developing new weapons, new attack strategies, and so on, which allowed them to exploit the AXIS weakness.
2) The RDM Cylons are kinda dumb. As RDM himself said, "The Cylons would have lost the first war if it had gone on much longer, which is why they agreed to the truce." Their strategy in the 2nd war was entirely based around the surprise attack, and, again quoting RDM, "In a fair fight the Cylons could not win a ware against the colonials."
They didn't build battle ships; they built luxury homes that shoot. They didn't expect a lengthy hunt or fire fight after the attack. The basestar design wasn't a mistake. The mistake was the skinjobs not turning over operational control of the hunt to the centurians. No tricks, no parlay, just rigid efficiency.
Frakking Baltar 😂
He was my favorite character because he filled so many roles. Villain, Genius, Lackey, Savior, Stooge, Leader and Blithering Idiot.
I flip-flopped so much on how I felt towards his character. One week I'd want him dead. The next week I'd feel bad for him. After that I'd think he was the only reasonable person in the show but then he'd make me want to kill him again.
It was *so* good.
They had a plan. Pearl Harbor or maybe Barbarossa in space. Plan A but no plan B. The Cylons' plan was to win this war in just this one battle, wiping out the entire colonial fleet. Galactica and Pegasus escaping the assault and still being operational was not part of their plan or even considered a possibility. That's why the Cylons' base stars were not designed and equipped to deal with a battle star. So their overconfidence made the Cylons indeed very human.
I always felt Galactica should've Sacrificed itself at New Caprica, and Adama's crew were forced to transfer to Pegasus. Then after a few episodes on Pegasus, they rename it Galactica in Honor of it and her crew's sacrifice.
This is probably the coolest sacrifice idea I have heard
I kind of thought the design was insignificant because the Cylons relied on overwhelming the enemy with their mass-produced fighters.
I think it's insane that she took so much damage during the finale. Not even pegasus withstood that much damage at the fight over new caprica
The pegasus was designed as a newer and smarter longer range engagement Battlestar.
He Galactica was a tried and tested beast that survived an actual war.
Don't forget the colonials put all their eggs in the smart fleet tech thinking it will keep them safe and the cylons didn't expect Galactica to even survive.
I imagine that their primary combat focus is electronic warfare, and as a result, their physical weaponry is not designed to defeat countermeasures that would otherwise be knocked out due to their primary assault on the ships command and control systems. 🤔
I would love to see Battlestar Galactica with Admiral Adama facing off against the Space Battleship Yamato and Captain Okita!
+Sujian 54
Kodai, prepare the Wave Motion Gun...
...
30 seconds later.. humanity erased, only anime characters with a distinct nostalgic 70s style remain. Also fan service.
Well I was hoping more for the 2199 remake but I mean you're not wrong.
I was referring to the 2199. I liked how the kept 70s design elements... and there is still fanservice, but atleast not that blatantly uncomfortable.
@@Tuning3434
Overkill. The conventional weapons on the battleship is more than sufficient to deal with it. Besides there might be something valuable aboard the Galactica. It's jump drive.
@@marrqi7wini54 While I didn't really went into watching into S2 of BSG, I am fairly sure they don't galaxy-skip. Spacebattleship Yamato's primary purpose was to travel to another galaxy. I'm fairly sure the wave motion engine is considerably more powerful than BSG's jump drive.
Love the fiery toaster.
This is a question I have asked myself many times. Battlestars stomp the shit out of them all the time. Interested to see how you handle this.
Galactica and Pegasus essentially 'one-shot' basestars on multiple occasions while taking an absolute beating. Part of me assumes basestars aren't dedicated warships, and if they're supposed to be carriers then why do they always close the distance in a battle? Theres no logic to the tactics & weaponry the cylons use imo. A couple of battlestar-esque ships to mop up any resistance from the invasion would have been invaluable. Even if they couldn't forsee anything less than total victory its still idiotic to have such a minimalistic arsenal in a war.
Whilst overwhelming the colonials with fighters would seemingly be effective, theres a *SLIGHT* flaw being that ships can just peace-out-FTL before that happens
Exactly! On top of that, the initial invasion relied completely on the virus killing all the ships it did. If even a handful of Battlestars had been behind on their software updates, the Cylons would have been fucked! The Basestar isn't warship, it's a munitions delivery platform.
they also could have literally just made battlestar-copies or even improved battlestars of their own, in greater numbers than the colonials, and beat them through attrition. The basestars seem to be designed for attacking with impunity which is odd since cyclons can resurrect, why would they be afraid of fighting face-to-face? At the same time it also seems perfectly designed to be hard-countered by battlestars (virus shenanigans not withstanding).
Maybe they thought 'whats the point building a battlestar copy when the colonials will just nuke it into submission no matter how armoured it is'.
But cyclons made FTL fighters that can carry nukes (ENORMOUS advantage over the colonials!) yet they keep engaging with their fraking carrier vessels! The carriers don't even need to be in the same solar system as the battle!
I also don't think its a stretch to assume the cylons could make excellent stealth fighters if they tried too (why haven't they?!). Even if the colonials eventually developed a countermeasure, they still would have been extremely valuable in the initial invasion
I suspect the Basestars were essentially orbital bombardment carriers. They worked well in their initial role of destroying a bunch of disabled colonial ships and bombing the hell out of their planets. They were just not suited for a pursuit role at all. Still, I mean... it's hard to really call the Cylons a failure, given they practically made humans extinct overnight. The basestars were basically designed to perform that sudden strike before the humans had any idea what was going on, so that constituted just a ton of firepower, without much defense.
I like that move the battlestars do where they orbit a basestar while orbiting it, as seen in the Resurrection Ship battle.
Great Video, as always. ☺
Just wondering, are you excited for the upcoming Science Fiction Role Playing Game "Star Field"?
Todd, is that you?
The animation of the battlestar getting shot by a giant gun and the burning toaster were hilarious additions to the video. Congrats :D
Out in the Black
A lack of flak
when you're under attack
Is pretty whack
The Cylons have a plan... the writer's might not, but the Cylons have a... series of directives and loose goals... also they did a vision board party last week, that was very exciting.
well thats a obvies case of the most powerfull tool know in all universes:
PLOTARMOR
Glad they fixed this in Blood & Chrome, the Basestars used are shown firing canons/flak.
Shame we won't see more of them though as that series never even got its first season :(
Those were the old 1st war basestars which were designed to be front-line battleships. The new 2nd war basestars were designed to be long-range strategic strike platforms, as the cylon plan didn't account for having to actually fight a resisting enemy.
Cyclons thought they were going to wipeout the 12 colonies completely. But wars develop a life of their own and the need to survive is perhaps the strongest drive in the human race.
humans are stubborn and don't give up. It would actually interesting to see how we would compare to aliens. Have they an even more raging hard on for war and conflict as humanity or are they all peaceloving hippies?
Ayy's being peaceloving hippies is unrealistic tbh. If they didnt have the drive to survive then they wouldnt have becomethe dominant species of their respective homeworlds and wouldnt have survived long enough to make it into space.
ebolamorph unless they did but on their world the most dangerous predator is the equivalent of a rabbit. Just a thought.
Again, nothing on that planet would have became smart enough to travel to space if that were the case. It wouldnt be logical for that to happen if they didnt have predators to worry about like us humans do. We are only the apex species of our planet because we make better tools than all other species on the planet. Otherwise the lions, tigers, bears etc would be the top dog on planet earth.
ebolamorph you misunderstand, It’s a level of scale ours verses theirs on earth a rabbit is a prey species and a weak one on their world it could be an apex predator after all they are “alien”. For all we know we could live on the galactic equivalent of a death world.
One could make the argument, loosely, that the Basestars were designed with the idea that the Cylons would not have to contend with a fleet that was composed of any, in any capacity, Colonial warships. The Basestars would arrive in system, park in orbit over a planet, and just pepper the surface with nukes killing off the population while Cylon raiders and heavy raiders dealt with any civilian space traffic and whatever limited defenses the colonies were thought to have. The Cylons were met with little to no real resistance when they launched their attacks. This only cemented their assumptions to be fact. By the time they discovered a single Battlestar had survived (two once the Pegasus resurfaced) they relised the mistake they made, but it was far too little to late. They had built so many Basestars that having to refit the fleet with projectile/kinetic weaponry, to destroy two Battlestars, would be too time consuming and impractical. They figured their ships were so vastly superior to a Battlestar that just employing sheer overwhelming force would simply win the day. There was simply no way, in their minds, that the humans could win or survive for very long. To the Cylons it was simply a matter of time and they were not required to apply effort beyond what we saw them use.
I wish BSG was still in production. Easily my all time favourite sci-fi
@AKUJIRULE I prefer SG-Atlantis.
@AKUJIRULE Babylon 5 certainly had more good seasons than BSG with it's 3 (closer to 2.5 really) good seasons. But I'd say BSG at it's best was better than Babylon 5 at it's best (I'm not even sure Babylon 5 was better than it's own bootleg series). SG-1 Was more of a Dumb fun kinda show, I'd rather compare it to the original Battlestart Galactica.
@AKUJIRULE Well I didn't so okay...
I also submit that one of the chief strengths the Cylons were counting on was superior communications. When you can disperse orders at the speed of light across a theater of battle, you probably have a distinct advantage against those who have to speak to communicate.
So the Cylons only got plot based weapons once and used them on the PEGASUS.
Remember that episode; i think it was called 44. The cylons kept pursuing the fleet pushing the fleet to exhaustion.. they had the means to destroy the Galactica, but stopped because they had a plan called let's make money by writing great episodes and selling merchandise. Look, we are still talking about it after all these years.
Apollo shot down the Olympic Carrier which was tracking the fleet for the Cylons before it could suicide nuke the rest of the ships. Had he hesitated, the chase would have likely ended right then and there.
You raise some interesting points, though seemingly fail to understand that the design of the Basestar is likely years in the making and as you say, designed for a particular purpose overall (the destruction of the Twelve Colonies) which it acquitted itself admirably.
It's able to act outside those design perimeters, though less effectively. That's the way with any ship in well-written science fiction. The Basestar isn't a Mary Sue - which it sounds like you want - it's a purpose-built warcraft that in chasing the Galactica and the fleet is operating in ways outside it's original design perimeters (it appears more like a mobile weapons platform. Which is to say it warps into position and either unleashes it's ballistic weapons or Raiders, kind of like an aircraft carrier).
Changing designs of any massive craft takes time, which in the middle of a conflict is perhaps not the best way to spend one's resources (especially when you have the benefit of seemingly limitless numbers and an enemy on the run).
And as far as point defense goes, that's the entire point of having waves of Raiders available to defend the mothership, especially considering that most opponents would either be overwhelmed by the Raiders combined with the Basestar's ballistic weapons if they stay and fight.
Well. the main argument isn't that the Basestar is inadequate for the job. The basestars were designed to simultaneously devastate twelve planets with nuclear missiles, then obliterate a crippled and almost defenceless navy. They did a perfect job. The issue is that the Cylons (since they're machines) had a myopic state of mind, and so they built ONLY basetars. They didn't plan for contingencies or any sort of flexibility. As a result, they had no ships capable of actually matching battlestars when the need arose. It's a flaw, but I see it as part of who the Cylons are. They are, despite everything, still machines. They still have the limitations of machines.
@@Cailus3542 Sure, because they had only one mission. They were machines, not psychic. And if their plan had worked as planned - keep in mind the Galactica was an older ship in the process of being mothballed (made into a museum) which was the only reason it survived (it had none of the interlinked computer networks that would have made it vulnerable to the Cylon attack) - then there would be no need to build ships to defend against Battlestars because there would be none remaining.
Off the top of my head I don't recall how the Pegasus survived the initial onslaught though I think they just lucked out and happened to be away at the time (in fact, I'm not quite sure the show explained how it was able to not be effected by the Cylon's attack on mainframe computers though later in the show this method of infiltration seems to have been largely abandoned).
Flexibility is only required when you're likely to not accomplish your goals by force and by all rights the Cylons should have slaughtered (and for the most part, did) the Colonial forces.
As I said there was literally no reason to change their tactics because they wiped out something like 98% (which is actually more like 99% because as I said no one intended the Galactica to be used as a combat vessel because it was being mothballed).
With results like those changing your tactics is not only insane, it's something a successful invasion force would NEVER do.
@@screenPhiles If I remember right the Pegasus was on dock just starting the process of maintenance, having all computers offline when the attack happened. It was also why they forcibly recruited civilians of surviving civilian ships, since many crewmembers had already left the ship for the planned maintenance, leaving the Pegasus short staffed when it made it's emergency escape.
@@Kaefer1973 I need to watch it again because I don't think that's the case. If I recall the Pegasus was never at the Scorpio ship yards in the first place, which was how it was able to avoid destruction.
I also don't recall them enlisting civilians though they did cannibalize civilian ships (which also doesn't quite makes sense because the Pegasus had foundries, all they needed was raw material, which could have been mined from any asteroid/asteroid belt they stumbled upon).
@@screenPhiles They most certainly force recruited civilians, I'm sure about that, I'm not sure if they did any retconning for their mini series though, but in the main series their forcefull drafting was definitively a topic.
This is made all the more puzzling when you look at the final assault on the singularity base. _That_ Cylon base had tons of ballistic weapons, and they kicked the snot out of the Galactica.
The depressing thing is, the Cylons basically use modern military strategy for ships. Spam missiles and fighters and prey your ship never has to take a hit.
And the Battlestar design philosophy has been out of date since the HMS Prince of Wales was sunk by a few Japanese planes.
BSG is very weird in that way.
@@piotrd.4850
So the HMS Prince and the KMS Bismark just self-destructed? The flagship of the German navy and the best battleship of the largest navy on Earth were destroyed without planes?
The Yamato, the largest battleship in history was killed without planes?
The Musashi, her sister ship was killed without carriers?
The 4 best battleships of WW2 were killed by planes. Ships that were built with AA in mind.
What kind of counter-historical stunt are you trying to pull here? If WW2 proved one thing, it was that planes>BBs.
@@hafor2846 Not that it applies to the anachronistic technology present in BSG, but the reason planes worked against BBs is because the latter couldn't reliably take the former down before it could do damage; the range on the AA was no better (and actually worse) than the range on the plane's weapons and the probability of a hit per shot was very low. Long-range RADAR, guided missiles, and lasers radically alter this dynamic; now it's the planes that are going to be getting shot before they can deliver a payload. The missile and laser a plane can carry are much smaller than what a ship can carry. We already have this problem with modern SAMs, it's why the USAF is eager to replace the easily targeted A10 with the much slipperier F-35 in the CAS role. All that being said, the passive armor of a BB is useless because the munitions themselves are so potent that the amount of passive armor you'd need to defend against them is overly cumbersome. It's all about active defense systems.
But modern naval warships still retain at least one deck gun and several CIWS, so they still have the option of artillery when the missiles fail. Hell guns may even make a comeback if railgun technology becomes practical.
Ballistic guns have crap range not to mention huge power requirements in space though which is why they used Raiders to deliver that kind of damage. It's more that the Basestars can't defend themselves because while they can be rebuilt, it's not like it can resurrect itself.
It’s the imperials all over again!
Fair point. Who controls the Cylon doctrine? Are there any models that would have the first inkling about correctly adapting? All evidence points to them being rather single minded, Cavil especially. And if he's the one basically controlling all the human models then the Cylon's stood no chance at fixing their tactics/doctrine throughout their pursuit of Galactica and her fleet.
As many have staited the posibility that new basestars where build holocause in mind not true hunting or slug fest battle that Colonials had in mind. There is other posible factor that limited the ship and tactical thinking of Cylons that they had limited pool of minds, lets think about it you have population estimated 20-40 milion but all of those people are split whit clones of 7-8 individuals hos baisick thinking and personalities is all ready set in stone, that limits new ideas and thinking out a box specialy as all desisions are made by voiting whit all 7-8 people how might not see your idea in the eye.
The Cylons had put themselves in a picle as the people how run the system lack true military mind and khohesive desison maiking organ Calvin is just a control freak how laced many things for good leader.
... One: Please god get better english, or typo check better? Not sure since you managed individuals, but butchered "has" and "basic" immediately after
Two: Nothing says the 7 or 8 Cylons are absolutely Rigid. As shown in the show VERY clearly, they are not clones exactly, just people running around with similar experiences and memories, and thus similar characters/personalities. And if they're cut off in some shape or form from the connection, they can deviate. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, and sometimes waaaaay off the deep fucking end. This is what makes the whole later part of BSG possible.
It doesn't justify scrapping all their older ships that had effective artillery and point defense though. The Cylons may have had a plan, but they clearly didn't comprehend the idea that no plan survives contact with the enemy. They literally had no contingency plan for the event any battlestars survived.
Galactica was constructed using steel while Cylon Basestars were constructed with some kind of dark paste that becomes hard once it dries?? So they snap in half all the time when hit in center junction with a few dozen missiles
Beautiful. If only the Cylon Rebels has even 1 Arachne class warship, the organic cylons would be wiped off the floor.
Exaggeration, but not far from the truth.
Arachne being the light warship of the 1st war Cylons, right?
The Arachne is the Cylon missile ship. You might mean the Revenant.
Chase Rector why not both?
Because the Arachne
Is shit
or they used guardian basestar heavy used missile but had point defense gun's and heavy cannons as well. they just need to update the raider's to the new model
Posted on my birthday! Thanks for helping my 26th birthday awesome and nerdy!
I would only like to know, why this was suddenly in my reccomended?
like
i never even watched battlestar galactica ._.
That's bad, you should watch it immediately
@@smattonellus8354 After watching this video, I don't think I want to, sounds like "plot convenience" is the main focus in the writing for this show.
@@JM-Games That's the main focus of every show. You may as well stop watching everything. Honestly, it's not perfect but it's still one of the bes sci-fi series ever made.
@@MrBottlecapBill To some degree you are right, I get where you are coming from but some shows add plot convenience as a last resort, where it is hidden well and not used very often, this entire show is based around the fact that they have plot armor which is absurd.
I don't think their plan accounted for a Battlestar surviving. Or said Battlestar being described as "Literally too angry to die".
Honestly, what the show could've done was go with the cumulative damage that peaked at the battle of New Caprica, resulting in the destruction of the Galactica. The Colonials would then shift over to Pegasus, an almost fully armed, armored, and functional Battlestar, possibly even renaming it the Galactica in memory of their fallen guardian.
Well, the plan is to not kill the ship whose name the series bears within the first 30 minutes of the pilot episode... and the plan was successful 😆