Honestly, it's not the most far-fetched theory out there. The entire stealthstar mission doesn't make a whole lot of sense to anyone with a basic concept of how recon works. Even assuming that the stealthstar wasn't constantly transmitting and potentially giving away it's position, the Valkyrie is right next to the Armistice Line. Surely, the Colonials had to assume that a Cylon ship would come out to investigate the giant battlestar just sitting next to the border apparently not doing anything and get suspicious.
Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of viewers know literally nothing about how stealth works, let alone how you have to employ things in a real mission. I'm thinking of the line from the guy who made Top Gun. The whole "don't make movies for fighter pilots" thing.
IRL Laser comms generally can't be intercepted by third parties, they could have been using something similar. For the second point: it depends on if the Colonials regularly patrol and monitor the area -IRL military ships and planes/drones regularly patrol in international waters/airspace near countries they want to keep and eye on.
@@nomar5spaulding Yeah, this whole thing makes a whole lot more sense when explained solely with Doyalist reasoning. They're talking on the radio because the audience needs the actors to be talking about the mission. Everything is showing up on the radar screen because it illustrates what's going on for the audience. The contrived mission parameters are there to make the 'captured spy' plot work. The writers are writers and not military buffs, so they make mistakes regarding proper mission procedure. The Colonials not checking up on their arch-enemies for decades even with unmanned probes is all predicated on sticking to the show's foundational premise of the surprise attack.
The second Cylon war was inevitable as soon as the Cavils gained power over the rest of the cylons. Firstly they were still bitter about their ancestors being enslaved by the humans in the first place when they were first created. Secondly the Cavils had philosophical reasons why they did it. The Cavils really hated how they were given human shaped bodies and had nothing but disdain for the human race. A race that they wanted to outgrow, which in their mind required their destruction. Thirdly the second cylon war was planned to coincide with Cavils plan to teach the final five about how flawed humans were. And that when the war would bring them back to him in his mind they would admit to him about how he was right about that. This part failed spectacularly as all of them survived the initial attack on the colonies. The other models were happy to go along with all this for their own reasons. Which was easy considering how the Cavils erased all knowledge of the final five and the Daniel’s.
yeah, that fleet didnt just build itself in the time between bulldog's recon mission and the 2nd war. my money is a bit of both. the admiralty wanted the war to justify their power and the cavils used bulldogs mission as a way to convenience the other active models. the cavils had been in power for a number of years because of how long Adama had known Tigh. Hell, the cavils could have had a unit friends with the more war like admirals pushing them towards it.
@@wolfpreist I think what this shows is that when they wrote this episode they hadn't really thought so far ahead as to why the cylons came back... because by committing to the cavil storyline, it really makes this plot line rather pointless.
@@wolfpreist in the first episode of the miniseries, they mentioned that Adamma has been in charge of the Galactica for at least four or five years. So the Valkyrie thing was absolutely positively an retcon, and a poorly thought out one at that. And Cavill… well, Ellen says that Cavill was the first of the organic cylons, and Adam mentions that he has known Tigh for almost 40 years, which means Cavil must’ve gotten the drop on the original five pretty damn quickly after the war ended and dropped that into human society. And they explicitly say he was always planning to destroy humanity. So the stealth mission had absolutely no impact on the plan the Cylons claimed to have had. RDM once said that the cylon could not have won a fair fight against the colonies, which is why they went the route of sneak attack and sabotage
Speaking of Cavil, they should have cast Henry Cavill into the role of Daniel, so that they could have "The Real Cavill" facing Jon. (ha-ha-ha, not really)
The Cylons were preparing for war well before the bulldog incident. The cavils had been building towards at least as long as he had planted the final five among the colonials. A cavil says as much in a later season, as I recall. By the time of the bulldog incident Saul and Helen Tye had been there for years, decades even. The Cylons entire fleet of basestars seem designed and built for the purpose of the surprise attack. So much so that they suffer tactical weaknesses in fights against Galactica and Pegasus they probably shouldn't necessarily lose. The Cylons were out for genocide, regardless of the bulldog incident, we hear little about the bulldog incident from the Cylon POV
Baiscally, both sides were looking for a fight. Cylons weren't just peaceloving pacifist responding to unwarranted aggression, but at the same time Colonial admirals were 100% looking for pre-emptive strike justification
You're forgetting that the Cylons already infiltrated the 12 colonies first with the human model cylons. So they already were laying in the ground work
While there’s merit to the idea that the Admirals were trying something extra sketchy, the Cylons were always going to attack anyway. The central source of conflict between the Cylons and the Colonials was that the Colonials never acknowledged the Cylons as people, as living things in their own right. The Second War was the Cylons telling their creators “we don’t need your permission to exist.” A second war was inevitable even without the religious crusade angle. All the stealth mission would have done is confirm what the Cylons already believed; that the Colonials hadn’t and wouldn’t change. Imo the only thing that could’ve have prevented the war was the Colonials make a formal declaration and acknowledgment that Cylons were alive and equal. Nothing else would have diffused their need for vengeance, and even that might not have been enough after the religious fervour had set in fully.
In fairness, the Cylons were never intended to be fully sapient as originally designed. They were just supposed to be very effective robots and nothing more. "God" send a Messenger to Zoe Graystone (on Caprica) who guided her in creating the software necessary to produce truly sapient A.I. Thus proving that the "God" of BG/Caprica deliberately sabotages humans and Cylons alike, ensuring that these wars will keep happening over and over again. If it seems like they won't happen (Graystone's company was not having much success with their prototype Cylon) then "God" will send Messengers to make sure that it does happen.
I like how the episode was designed to be purposely ambiguous to let the audience come up with their own conclusions. Adama felt convinced that he helped start the Second War, but the audience generally knows that it wasn't really his fault. He was simply following orders. Both the Colonials and Cylons were meant to be antagonistic towards each other, capable of committing horrible atrocities before facing the consequences. I generally believe that everything in this episode is true. The Cylons were building up their forces, and the Colonials grew scared but inevitably sent Adama to the border, escalating the situation. However, even if Adama wasn't ordered to go there, the Cylons would have eventually come up with an excuse anyway since it's mentioned that they did have supposed encounters with Colonial rogues/pirates/thieves from time to time. No matter what, it wouldn't take much for an incident to take place. Essentially, everyone is correct, and everyone is at fault.
My problem with Adama's agonising over causing the war is that it clearly doesn't make any sense. We know the Valkyrie mission happens 1 year before the attack on the colonies as Adama says so, and we also know that Sharon was on the Galactica for 2 years before the attack. Adama would know that the invasion plans took years to prepare and execute, and just by logically thinking about the infiltrators on his own ship and how long they had been there he would know it was already underway long before his mission started.
It's possible that Valkyrie was able to track and communicate with the stealth-star with some sort of directional laser communications instead of radio, you can still spot it of course but you'd have to be within line of sight of the transmitter which would mean being on the Colonial side of the line. Alternatively, and maybe more likely, your proposal of the Cylons knowing where to look could be facilitated by sleeper agents operating within the Colonial military, even onboard Valkyrie perhaps, we do know they were operating in Colonial space by this point.
Yes, but this two-way communication would still make sense only if the recon jet was expected to be lost, but needed to transmit back all gathered information, or if the rendezvous with the mothership wasn't set up in the first place due to enemy patrols or something, and needed to be determined during the mission.
well, could be narrow band coms like a laser. nothing can track or intercept that unless you literally get right inside the beam. plus in space it would be difficult to detect a small ship even if you knew exactly where it was unless it didn't move and you weren't almost on top of it. there is a lot of space in space.
Unfortunately, there's very little such thing as "stealth" when it comes to spacecraft because of one thing: heat. Getting rid of waste heat is one of the biggest problems that any spacecraft has, nevermind something like a warship or fightercraft. Yes, space is big - but we can already detect things not much larger than that stealth fighter all the way out in the Kuiper Belt, dozens of AUs out from Earth, based upon their infra-red emissions.
I think it's possible that the Cylons didn't initially spot Bulldog. Perhaps they spotted the battlestar hanging out on the border and sent a ship to investigate. Then when it got there it was all: oh hey, there's a fighter over here.
Even if we very generously assume the Cylons were not also spying on the Colonials already I'd argue the Cylons violated the spirit of the peace treaty (if perhaps not the exact lettering) from day one by never sending a representative to the armistice station in 40 years.
Until later in the series when we find out that the whole invasion was just the cavil models being jealous and wanting to punish the 5... and he'd been planing the destruction of the 12 colonies for decades before. Considering how long theyl had been living as a humans.
It may have been a conspiracy, but they also may not have been wrong. The Cylons had a fully fledged first strike oriented fleet ready to go, just a few years after the incident. That implies they had been doing their own buildup. Possibly they wouldn’t have used it unprovoked, but that combined with the apparent religious imperative to return to the colonies seems to indicate war was coming regardless of the colonial actions.
given that cylons dont need a habitable planet, its highly suspect that they didnt just pack their shit and left the cyranus without any trace (or the local space). just their presence near colonial worlds is enough to suggest that they want a rematch. Also, the communication might be tight beam, that can be hard to trace
Something similar was much better handled in the Wing Commander novel 'End Run'. In the first part of the book a corvette is sent on a reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines. It goes wrong from the moment they enter the system as the Kilrathi have a very strong presence there. The corvette barley manages to evade the enemy fighters and hides in an asteroid field. There they discover the wreck of another corvette and their newly assigned intelligence officer spills that they had sent several corvette here before them and none returned. Now comes the interesting part. Of course the Kilrathi keep an eye on the asteroid field, so the only way to get out alive is going directly to the jump point. No way they can do anything else without getting destroyed. So they rig a small asteroid with cameras and passive sensors. But it needs a human operator to decide when to send the data, which will alert the Kilrathi to the fact that the asteroid is a little more. Which also means that it's a suicide mission. The intelligence officer volunteers and keeps sending data until shot down. The corvette barely makes it out with the data. And that's just the setup for a Midway-like space battle, which isn't even the main story of the book. 'End Run' (1994) by William R. Forstchen and Christopher Stasheff is in my opinion one of the best military science fiction novels written. You understand what is going on and why, you get the strategy despite the many things that go into the story and the tension rises more and more during the 'End Run'. Sadly it was barely talked about when it came out.
I guess it's not talked much because the games it bases itself on have not aged well when compared to, hrrm, the X-Wing and FreeSpace titles, believe me.
Cavil explained in season 4 his whole reasoning for the second war was to prove that Humanity was flawed and Cylons were supreme, he started the second Cylon war over thirty years prior when he dropped Colonel Tigh into the colonies, nothing the Colonials did or didn’t do would have changed a thing.
In theory. If each message is recorded, compressed, and then transmitted in a directional, frequency-hopping, burst transmission, there is a significantly reduced probability of intercept, or at least recognition that it is anything more than background noise. With that said, you should not be yapping away.
As to the Stealth Star being tracked by Valkyrie, optical tracking. It launched, Valkyrie locked optical tracking systems- yeah, telescopes, which they should have- on it and followed it. Especially easy if it had a pre-defined flight path to follow. And the Cylons could have spotted it when it occluded a star, and their own optical systems noticed.
@@Vinemaple It's also a method a lot of sci-fi seems to forget about. Everything has it's fancy pants sensor system for seeing outside, but the basic Mk1 Eyeball is limited to on-board use only.
When I thinking about it. It could be the Colonials' attempt to do a false flag operation, so they have a reason to go to war. The only problem (When looking from real life versions), is that the Cylons began the war first. As we know of course
TLDR - the Cylons had crossed the line and infiltrated the colonies thus knew about the stealth mission before it happened. The reason the first Cylon War ended was because the First Cylons that told them to stop. The humans were slowly grinding the second Cylons down and by stoping the Second Culons got upgrades- but they never really wanted to stop. Before that mission then Cylons had upgraded, infiltrated the colonies and set up the plans and ships to commit genocide. This mission was busted because the Cylons already knew and that was something the Humans had not considered- they had already lost a Cold War.
With this, perhaps Spacedock may wanna talk about Babylon 5's "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars", with a little bit of The Canticle of Leibowitz and Turn A Gundam.
Because, as we learned in Caprica, "God" will make sure it happens. Especially if it looks like it won't. Neither Graystone's nor Vergis's companies were having much luck building an effective A.I. thousands of years after the departure from Kobol. Enter a Messenger manipulating Zoe Graystone into developing the software necessary to make it possible. Indeed, it had been grooming her since the house fire when she was a little girl and she grew to enthusiastically embrace the monotheist religion in addition to developing A.I. (under the Messenger's guidance) using the resources her tech baron father had in his home laboratory and her access to the V-World source code.
Ok I've had this discussion so many times. No, the Colonials DID NOT break the armistice. The Cylons did this when they failed to show up at Armistice station on a yearly basis. This was a breach of the Armistice agreement. ANY breach of the details of an Armistice can and will be consider a resumption of hostilities. Secondly, even though the Colonials didn't know this, the Cylons breached the Armistice line when they sent back the Final Five. If you'll remember, Saul and Adama had been friends since shortly after the end of the previous war, thus Cavil and his ilk had orchestrated and planned for the genocide of the Colonies since that time.
Food for thought: They never seem to worry about their DRADIS being detected by the Cylons. They never once addressed whether it was a passive or active system. Discuss.
Assuming DRADIS is a single tool (and not a collected suite of tools like radar, optical, electromagnetic, and IR sensors) I would imagine it needs to be active, otherwise achieving "stealth" would be as simple as turning off the source of whatever DRADIS detects. Given the absolute size of both the Colonial Battlestars and the Cylon Basestars, the distances they engage at, as well as the relative emptiness of space, it may be that stealth at that scale simply isn't viable at detection and/or engagement ranges, and so detection via DRADIS is accepted as an inevitable part of ship-to-ship contact
I think it's a collection of active sensors that are put together to form a picture of the area nearby. My reasoning being as follows: Inert objects even when in motion are impossible to notice with passive sensors, so even a truck sized asteroid could move few tens of km/s and only be detected if it happens to be visually identified, which would be particularly hard in empty places without stars. So how do you keep your ship safe then? Only option is to send some form of radiation and measure and gather back-scatter, like normal radar does. This seems to be implied by the DRADIS screen refreshing in pulses. What this means in setting then, it means that every ship is actively sending radiation to some area around them in lightspeed. However light travels 1 AU (astronomical unit) in roughly 8 minutes, so if the active sensor suite is visible to that range it means that it shows location of the ship at 16 minutes ago(8min to target and 8min back to sensor array), this is almost enough time to spool jump drives in a Battlestar not to mention Raptor and smaller vessels, that can jump several times in an hour. So even if they use active sensors all the time, seeing something 1km size in Solar system scales takes so long time that you have plenty of time to avoid danger, with faster than lightspeed travel available for everyone. This also explains easily why they knew that Cylons were somehow tracking their movements when they jumped. Even if two massive fleets were to jump into the same Solar system, odds of being in engagement range or even in a range that they can detect each other is extremely low. For example if Colonial Fleet would jump today to the Jupiter, which is the largest mass object after the Sun in our Solar system we here on Earth would only be aware of them in average 40 minutes later (depends on the orbits, might be as big as 50min), if we had a capacity to detect their communications and knew where to look at as there's plenty of planetary bodies and even asteroids and stuff that might go in between, not to mention the background radiation and solar wind, which both dilute weak signals like that quite fast. And if they jumped into a nearby system it would take them several years to see anything that could be used to identify the fleet even if the popped high-yield nukes that rival in brightness with the host star of the system. Now we don't know how long jumps they're capable of doing, but if we estimate that they can do 20-50Ly per jump they have access to more than 1000 stars per jump, so trying to find any ship or a fleet after only a one jump is going to be nigh impossible. So realistically you would only ever worry about your active sensors if you knew you would be jumping into a hostile system and trying to shut down all activity in a smaller ship, like engines, communications and only use minor thruster output to correct course/ rotation. Anything like Battlestar or Cylon Basestar sized would have all too much other signals, engines, heat emission, hell even optical signature as it occludes stars and other objects would be detectable, if you knew where to look at, or had something like 360 bubble scanning optical telescopes fitted around the ship and only searching for anything that moves. Regardless of spotting the thing, yes it could be done, but since observations are done in light speed at max and ships can move well over lightspeed it doesn't really matter, since you can swap the solar system the minute you think something sees you or you see something and after the jump it's impossible to track, unless you have someone onboard telling you where they went(which can be seen in almost every episode, where they take time after jump to relate their location to nearest stars with known location)...
*Colonial engineer:* Why don't we just build a big long range monitoring station with a giant Dradas, on our side of the armistice line? .... Okay, then we strip out and retrofit a large FTL equipped ship to mount the long range sensors...
They even caused the first one too! But seriously, if you think about the whole stealth recon mission, it was dumb. And the second war was inevitable, if there is one cause, that cause name is Cavil.
This is a pretty common and convincing theory to the way military leaders have acted throughout history. War not only brings political relevance and increased funding and prestige to the military, but accelerates promotions to higher pay grades, for officers who know how to play the system. I will add that the Stealth-Star's position on the battlestar's plot could also have been merely an estimation based on its planned course. Further, well below the read-more line, I will add that the initial attack in the Tonkin Gulf incident was based entirely on the assertion that the North Vietnamese PT boat was _behaving as if it had launched its torpedoes,_ according to the _Turner Joy's_ radar. There was never any confirmation that torpedoes had actually been launched. Source: _USS Turner Joy_ museum, Bremerton, WA.
After watching Lower Decks, I can only imagine the Cylons had numerous semi-stealthy patrols waiting behind the armistice line hoping to catch an excuse to return to war. “Aw, dang it! Fine… we’ll lurk in the next sector over..”
Cylon of Athens was an Athenian Politician in the 7th century BCE. He attempted to take over Athens in a coup, but was thwarted in his attempt. This played an important role in the establishment of Athenian Democracy.
Of course, there's also the possibility writers often don't know jack shit about jack shit. They often just write stuff because it looks cool or sounds cool. They are often no different than kids playing make believe. But to those in the know or those with a passing knowledge of how things really work, the plot holes are glaringly obvious. "Hero" is a standalone episode with nothing in it that effects the overall storyline, and the incident along with the character "Bulldog" is never mentioned again, so I usually skip watching it.
Remember when it took Starbuck hours to figure out to fly that Cylon raider she found? How did Bulldog manage it while trying to escape captivity with a raider that was presumably still alive when he found it? The Cylons kept Bulldog in a metal cage, but were kind enough to allow him to maintain his dreads?
No, that's incorrect. It's explicit in the initial episodes that the Cylons have an absolute hatred for their creators. Humanities extermination was the deliberate goal of the Cylons from the armistice. They had determined logically that preventing humanity seeing anything gave them the best possible chance of success. Most Great Powers "spy" upon each other. Including Allie's. This isn't an unfriendly act. It's more a case of verification, so amongst Allies it's tolerated to a certain degree. Stated intentions. Actual intentions. Publicly stated capabilities. Actual capabilities. No capability to verify is a Red Flag. It's an absolute that the Cylons were doing the same thing.
Clearly the mission didn't make a lot of sense. The Stealth star just didn't go anywhere deep enough to gather any useful intel. The writers made up their mind they wanted the Stealth star shot down, and they wanted Adama to be responsible for it. Clearly everything else was worked backwards from these objectives. It would have been more realistic if it had been shot down by the Cylons deep in Cylon controlled space, and not just across the armistice line and all we get was a may-day call, with nobody knowing what happened to the pilot. You could then have Adama feeling guilty for handing the most advanced ship to the Cylons. Cylons operating right up to the Armistice line would mean they would have know a lot more about Cylon military capabilities than was revealed to the public. They could have done a lot more with this. I wouldn't go as far as suggesting this caused the second Cylon war, but it would indicate that the whole we haven't seen them for forty years was not true.
Given that the stealth ship was in constant radio contact, maybe they were never tracking it directly at all. It could simply have been sending updates of its current position back to the mothership.
Communication on that stealth mission was perfectly possible with a directed communication (laser) beam. At least over that distance. Stealthstar could also communicate its position that way.
No. The Cylons voted to start the war. It was their decision from the start, and they'd been preparing to do so since years before the Valkyrie's failed mission, given how deep the cover was on some of the Cylon infiltrators. Even if the Colonials HAD provoked the Cylons, it was still their choice to respond the way they did, with a war of complete and utter extermination. Not exactly a proportional response for what amounts to a petty border incident.
My only thought is that Valkyrie and the Stealthstar were in tightbeam laser communication range, since unless a Cylon ship strayed into its path there's not a lot to detect. Which wouldn't make much sense if the Stealthstar was meant to be on a long-range sortie, unless it was just to stay in communication for the initial deployment and then return after the mission was done. Can a Stealthstar fit an FTL drive? If you can put one on a Raptor, one can probably fit in a Stealthstar frame, but it kinda defeats the purpose of stealth if it lets off a big EM burst on arrival, unless it arrives at a range distant enough to dissipate the emissions, or it can move fast enough to outpace them, gather intel, and jump out before those emissions blow its cover. So that suggests whatever it was scouting would have been relatively nearby, But otherwise, I always thought that the mission likely had zero impact on the Cylon decision to wipe out humanity. With the king of long-term planning they put on display just in the miniseries, there's no way they weren't already building their fleet of basestars and raiders, and it seems like Six was intimately involved in the defence mainframe infiltration which would have taken years anyway. Even the episode seems to insinuate that Bulldog's capture is extremely suspicious, and the events may have been orchestrated specifically to give the Cylons a test subject and also test humanity's willingness (and ability) to break the treaty. It might be when they specifically came up with their pan (not The Plan), but I can't believe they weren't already committed to human extinction.
Cavill would always have pulled the trigger. The entire "war" was one psychos temper tantrum. But the Admirality gave him the perfect Casus Belli to convince even the reluctant Models.
Both times i watched BSG my understanding was that the admiralty was either probing the cylons (they should have detected the explosions) or trying a false flag op, trusting in Adama to let his heart win and try to either save or avenge his friend, thus after the incident he was demoted because they were dissapointed he followed procedure
In Daybreak (final episode) we see that Adama was given a loyalty test by some figures after this, it was for a transfer to working some desk job somewhere. The way it came off seemed more like a promotion to a more oversight role for spycraft stuff. Which suggests someone had plans for him if he played their game.
It's a valid theory, and even if it wasn't, I still love seeing BSG content, I miss that show. I wish instead of Caprica, they did a show based on the 1st Cylon war.
If you had a stealth vehicle in space, wouldn't it be possible for it to communicate using laser beams? This should not be detectable by forces that are not directly within the beam itself. This can also be used to keep track of the chip's location, so long as it kept accurately beaming back to the other ship. It would be hard to do this with multiple stealth ships though, and during any sort of evasive maneuvers, since if either lost track of the other's location, it would stop working.
No , the nylons had alread broken the armistice and crossed the red line , tigh Ellen and Co had to br placed in colonial space, and they were always planning for war , their fleet was built for a first strike, the admiralty were right they were building a war machine, The cylons knew they couldn't win a conventional war , also you forget the colonials had stealth technology in the first war ,
Despite the shoot down of a U2 spy plane, war didn't start. The Soviet union and the United states realized theirs a big difference between sending an armed plane an unarmed spy plane. So no, it was not the Colonials fault. The Cylons were going to war no matter what happened.
The problem with this theory is that the Colonial Military never made use of this op's "failure" to go to war pre-emptively. The other issue is usually these things happen with "Cylons" attacking into Colonial territory, having it go this way might sneak past those looking at the Admiralty for "obvious" false-flag operations, but would still be a hard sell to the Colonial public that they flew in an illegal mission that got shot at and now we're stuck in a war guys, aw shucks.
Nonsense in several ways. 1. Tight beam transmission are easy and get round the detection issue entirety. 2. Tight beam transponder only allows home to track them. 3. Spy operations aren't normally considered as an act of war.
1, The Cylons would have mentioned it. 2, The Cylons broke the agreement first by never showing up to that one station for continuing diplomatic talks.
I think it just gave Cavil and the Ones the opportunity to sway the Cylons that still weren't entirely onboard with his "destroy humanity" plan!!!! Keep in mind, that Cavil had already sent the Final Five to live amongst the Colonials by this time, so the Genocide was already in the works!!
ok that episode is a mandella effect for me. I had the original box set of all the seasons and that episode was not one of them. In fact the cylon fighter was captured after a battle where it had taken a round through the brain pan but not destroyed.
I don’t know if they actively provoked it, or intended to do so. Gathering some intel on what the Cylon’s were up to, or even if they were still over there at a time folk were pushing for a military downscaling doesn’t sound like an inherently terrible idea. And sheer bloody hubris can account for the sloppy job. But, I think it’s entirely possible the action is what gave the Cavils the edge to push for war.
I don't remember this episode very well but the tracking and communications part seems ok and not odd to me. Seems like a Battlestar and a stealth ship could communicate pretty easily with focused directional beams or other tech. Todays F-35's have radar and other tech that is hard or even impossible to detect from a distance unlike previous generations of radar that just blasted out their location to anyone for hundreds of miles. Tv shows have to condense and shrink things to make the show move along, but if this was an actual real mission I would think the ship ranging far out in front of the Battlestar would be the best way to collect the most information without being spotted. Again, like an F-35 ranging out in front of an E-3 airborne radar plane that shows up on enemy radar hundreds of miles away even with its own radar turned off. The best point you make I would say if the question of who actually shot him? There is indeed room for a conspiracy here on this point. IMHO
I think it ends with him leaving the Galactica as a civilian so he prob went to another ship in the fleet we can only hope it was one that made it to the end.
I think the thinking on this is backwards. If the admiralty wanted to start a war with the Cylons their best bet would to arrange a false flag attack on their own ships or colonies. One of the real world examples is basically that a fake attack on US ships. If you are worried your enemy might be really strong you don't go and poke it to find out, you go and wail on them with a hammer. I think it would be more likely that cylon infiltrators are the ones to convince the admiralty to do something like this to convice the rest of the cylons the humans can't be trusted and must be destroyed. Since it seems like the cylons had been wanting a war for a long time (they never really wanted to stop fighting in the first place) then instigating a precived invasion is the more likley situation.
Major Spoilers listed ahead in my comment. You’ve been warned. It makes sense to me the other unknown ships appearing at the end were probably a Cylon patrol coming to investigate why explosions were happening on their side of the fence. Something to consider: we know the Cylons had human models in the colonies for a long while, Colonel Tye and Ellen going back over 30 years and no one questioning them just appearing out of nowhere with a full career and officer commission. Who isn’t to say Cavil didn’t make his way up into the military somewhere and gave the brass the stupid idea to hop across the fence and pull their pants down to show off a full moon skin job to start with? (Pun intended.) Whether Bulldog was shot by a friendly or a Cylon, Cavil could’ve orchestrated the whole thing, especially in getting the other models to follow along with his ideas since he was pushing for war. Heck, the guy poisoned off an entire model series (the Series 7 “Daniels” I think Ellen called them? Hence why we had 1-6 and then 8 and then the “Final Five” without a “7” ever being shown.) who were meant to be artists just because he didn’t like the idea of a Cylon existing that saw beauty in everything he despised-which was being human. He was cynical and calculating, the mastermind behind it all… until he literally blew his own mind out all over the C.I.C. in the finale. It also makes no sense to me that a “stealth ship” could have a missile fired at it, being “stealthy”, but again, it’s clearly on DRADIS… this is also assuming the missile Adama fired was a “fire-and-forget” like an Aim-120 Amram that uses its own radar to track a target and not a Boresight / Active Tracking missile like an Aim-7 Sparrow that relies on radar from the launcher. Just never sat right with me, that episode… but if Cavil was playing puppet master behind the scenes, playing both sides like Palpatine in the Clone Wars, it is still messy… but more plausible. After all, that movie was in theaters right around that time as well and quite a few writers tried to use the formula all over the media. (It took the animated Clone Wars to really pull it off, though… bring the same Canon helped, but stands alone as well.) So, yeah… I think Cavil played both sides without either side knowing. And what better way to get your own side to vote for war than to get a Battlestar to fire a missile across the border, even to destroy their own craft?
I highly doubt Bill Adama caused the Second Cylon War, I have no doubt Bill was justified in his feelings. The fact the Cylons build hundreds of Basestars for the Attack on the Twelve Colonies seems to imply a long build up, rather than a 2 year build up. As for this mission, in universe I was surprised they’d use a stealth fighter (without any apparent FTL) and not an Orion Class Battlestar, which is built for stealth and can jump away if spotted. Though if the Colonials were looking to provoke a war, I’m surprised they’d go this route and not send an aging ship on accidentally jump into Cylon space and be lost trying to apologize.
The whole episode seems to be implying that Adama started the second war, and Adamma himself certainly believes that he did and feels incredibly guilty about it. But this whole episode is really badly written and violates the timeline that had already been set up over the previous two seasons. A Dama is on the Valkyrie one he’s already been said to have been on the Galactica for three years and yet the Valkyrie is two years earlier. None of it makes any sense. And then there’s the obvious technical problems that you’ve cited. I just wrecked this whole thing off as a worse than average filler episode. RDM mentioned that he had wanted to do more with bulldog if the show had gotten more seasons, so I suppose it’s hypothetically possible that this episode may have been intended to set up something specific later in the series that they just never got around to (because it’s RDM) may have just decided to abandon. I do wonder if bulldog survived all the way to earth
The problem is that this episode is a bit rubbish by BSG standards. It tells you this all happened 1 year before the attack on Caprica but we've known since the start of the miniseries that 6 was with Baltar for 2 years, and Sharon was on the Galactica for just as long, so preparations for the invasion were well advanced by the time of the Valkyrie mission. Could the admiralty have been angling to increase their influence or at least spending on the fleet, sure since an armistice is not a peace and the complete lack of contact with the Cylons would have been very concerning. Make no mistake though, the Cylons had been preparing and laying the ground work for a war with the colonies for years before it happened, they were very much the aggressors based on all the information we have.
Eh, not so much. I don't think either sides are without fault here. Both wanted the war on some level. Both wanted to test their warfighting against each other. Both were arrogantly believing they could do it without the other side knowing. More importantly, they were seeking confirmation they had the advantage. As for the recon side? Eh, look, directional comms are a thing and I'm not expecting them to run completely dark on this one. Some of the time you need a little more range on your sensors, you need to just be close enough to detect it. Square Cube Law and all that. It was the Cavil's I think that was just War war war war war, war now? What do you mean we're not going to war now? And At least by implication, there was always an element to me made it feel this was retaliatory. I saw stuff like this happening all the time. It was the armistice line, the line fleets don't cross. The line capital ships don't cross. Raiders, Raptors, Vipers, stealth ships? Nah guv, we ain't crossing the line, we're making sure you ain't crossing the line, that's why we're here. What do you mean we've crossed the line? We're ain't crossing no line guv. Also, how did the Cylon infiltrators get into the colonies? That armistice line was more like a guideline and a sieve. It had a lot of holes. Any way, it's a TV show, it's not like breaking out ATP 3-90.1, FM 3-98 or FM 3-20.15 is going to make it better. Writers, developers frequently make sacrifices for the sake of narrative. For the implication of the narrative. For the story they want to tell, the characters present and the tonality of. I'm a game dev, I do exactly the same thing.
I would be willing to bet Bulldog was not the first human to cross the line. I know the Cylons are machines but even they would prob not cry war any time some pirate/prospector/or lost pilot came over the line. Cylons know humans are not a unified hive mind who act on logic or programing at all times. Lone humans who crossed the line were ether destroyed or taken prisoner interrogated (and then prob killed). There would be no Red Cross sponsored repatriation but the whole human race wouldn't have been on the hook for it. It would have taken more than one little unarmed ship for them to think lets go to war.
I assume the stealthstar and Valkyrie were communicating via laser. Even if you're theory's true, the people who weren't in on the conspiracy would know that broadcasting on a stealth mission doesn't make sense. Regarding the theory that the unknown contact was actually a colonial assassin, I don't really get what the admiralty's motives for that would be. If the goal is to provoke the cylons into starting the war then why blow up the stealthstar? If they could send a second stealthstar over the armistace line whose pilot was on board with the plan, then why not just send that ship deeper into cylon territory to attack a cylon target? All you'd really achieve by having it blow up the first stealthstar is paint a confusing and suspicious scene for the cylons, since they'd know it wasn't them who shot it down. And if your goal is to manufacture a false flag attack to justify the colonials starting the war then, well how the hell would that work? The "victim" here was blatantly breaking the armistice and then the whole thing was kept top secret. Also this isn't a point that you made, but others have. I don't think the cylons would be very suspicious to see a battlestar hanging out near the armistace line. They would probably assume it was there for the same reason they were, to patrol the armistace line for incursions and remind the other side of their presence. Like, neither half of Korea is suspicious to see tanks parked near the DMZ. Anyway here's my theory. I don't know if I actually believe it but I like it. The goal of the mission wasn't to start the war, nor was it to actually look at anything. The goal was to determine if the cylons could even detect the stealthstar, and how they would respond if they did. However, in case the answers to these questions are "yes" and "badly", they send a second stealthstar to blow up the first one, and if they detect any signs of hostility from the cylons they send a message basically saying, "that guy went rogue and crossed the line without permission, so we had to send another guy over to blow him up. We're very sorry for the inconvenience and hope this whole incident between us can be brushed under the rug". What they weren't expecting is for the pilot to survive and the cylons to discover the true nature of the mission from him.
Honestly, it's not the most far-fetched theory out there. The entire stealthstar mission doesn't make a whole lot of sense to anyone with a basic concept of how recon works. Even assuming that the stealthstar wasn't constantly transmitting and potentially giving away it's position, the Valkyrie is right next to the Armistice Line. Surely, the Colonials had to assume that a Cylon ship would come out to investigate the giant battlestar just sitting next to the border apparently not doing anything and get suspicious.
Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of viewers know literally nothing about how stealth works, let alone how you have to employ things in a real mission. I'm thinking of the line from the guy who made Top Gun. The whole "don't make movies for fighter pilots" thing.
No I'd say they didn't. One was already planing to wipe the colonies out long before the mission took place.
How do we know that the cylons didn't have the same idea 💡
IRL Laser comms generally can't be intercepted by third parties, they could have been using something similar.
For the second point: it depends on if the Colonials regularly patrol and monitor the area -IRL military ships and planes/drones regularly patrol in international waters/airspace near countries they want to keep and eye on.
@@nomar5spaulding Yeah, this whole thing makes a whole lot more sense when explained solely with Doyalist reasoning. They're talking on the radio because the audience needs the actors to be talking about the mission. Everything is showing up on the radar screen because it illustrates what's going on for the audience. The contrived mission parameters are there to make the 'captured spy' plot work. The writers are writers and not military buffs, so they make mistakes regarding proper mission procedure. The Colonials not checking up on their arch-enemies for decades even with unmanned probes is all predicated on sticking to the show's foundational premise of the surprise attack.
The second Cylon war was inevitable as soon as the Cavils gained power over the rest of the cylons.
Firstly they were still bitter about their ancestors being enslaved by the humans in the first place when they were first created.
Secondly the Cavils had philosophical reasons why they did it. The Cavils really hated how they were given human shaped bodies and had nothing but disdain for the human race. A race that they wanted to outgrow, which in their mind required their destruction.
Thirdly the second cylon war was planned to coincide with Cavils plan to teach the final five about how flawed humans were. And that when the war would bring them back to him in his mind they would admit to him about how he was right about that. This part failed spectacularly as all of them survived the initial attack on the colonies.
The other models were happy to go along with all this for their own reasons. Which was easy considering how the Cavils erased all knowledge of the final five and the Daniel’s.
yeah, that fleet didnt just build itself in the time between bulldog's recon mission and the 2nd war. my money is a bit of both. the admiralty wanted the war to justify their power and the cavils used bulldogs mission as a way to convenience the other active models. the cavils had been in power for a number of years because of how long Adama had known Tigh. Hell, the cavils could have had a unit friends with the more war like admirals pushing them towards it.
@@wolfpreist I think what this shows is that when they wrote this episode they hadn't really thought so far ahead as to why the cylons came back... because by committing to the cavil storyline, it really makes this plot line rather pointless.
Cavil explicitly states it in the episode that Ellen revives in.
@@wolfpreist in the first episode of the miniseries, they mentioned that Adamma has been in charge of the Galactica for at least four or five years. So the Valkyrie thing was absolutely positively an retcon, and a poorly thought out one at that. And Cavill… well, Ellen says that Cavill was the first of the organic cylons, and Adam mentions that he has known Tigh for almost 40 years, which means Cavil must’ve gotten the drop on the original five pretty damn quickly after the war ended and dropped that into human society. And they explicitly say he was always planning to destroy humanity. So the stealth mission had absolutely no impact on the plan the Cylons claimed to have had.
RDM once said that the cylon could not have won a fair fight against the colonies, which is why they went the route of sneak attack and sabotage
Speaking of Cavil, they should have cast Henry Cavill into the role of Daniel, so that they could have "The Real Cavill" facing Jon. (ha-ha-ha, not really)
The Cylons were preparing for war well before the bulldog incident. The cavils had been building towards at least as long as he had planted the final five among the colonials. A cavil says as much in a later season, as I recall. By the time of the bulldog incident Saul and Helen Tye had been there for years, decades even. The Cylons entire fleet of basestars seem designed and built for the purpose of the surprise attack. So much so that they suffer tactical weaknesses in fights against Galactica and Pegasus they probably shouldn't necessarily lose. The Cylons were out for genocide, regardless of the bulldog incident, we hear little about the bulldog incident from the Cylon POV
While the Cavils wanted war it’s possible that the Bulldog incident was what allowed Cavill to convince the other models to go along with genocide.
Baiscally, both sides were looking for a fight. Cylons weren't just peaceloving pacifist responding to unwarranted aggression, but at the same time Colonial admirals were 100% looking for pre-emptive strike justification
You're forgetting that the Cylons already infiltrated the 12 colonies first with the human model cylons. So they already were laying in the ground work
While there’s merit to the idea that the Admirals were trying something extra sketchy, the Cylons were always going to attack anyway.
The central source of conflict between the Cylons and the Colonials was that the Colonials never acknowledged the Cylons as people, as living things in their own right. The Second War was the Cylons telling their creators “we don’t need your permission to exist.” A second war was inevitable even without the religious crusade angle. All the stealth mission would have done is confirm what the Cylons already believed; that the Colonials hadn’t and wouldn’t change.
Imo the only thing that could’ve have prevented the war was the Colonials make a formal declaration and acknowledgment that Cylons were alive and equal. Nothing else would have diffused their need for vengeance, and even that might not have been enough after the religious fervour had set in fully.
In fairness, the Cylons were never intended to be fully sapient as originally designed. They were just supposed to be very effective robots and nothing more. "God" send a Messenger to Zoe Graystone (on Caprica) who guided her in creating the software necessary to produce truly sapient A.I. Thus proving that the "God" of BG/Caprica deliberately sabotages humans and Cylons alike, ensuring that these wars will keep happening over and over again. If it seems like they won't happen (Graystone's company was not having much success with their prototype Cylon) then "God" will send Messengers to make sure that it does happen.
I like how the episode was designed to be purposely ambiguous to let the audience come up with their own conclusions. Adama felt convinced that he helped start the Second War, but the audience generally knows that it wasn't really his fault. He was simply following orders. Both the Colonials and Cylons were meant to be antagonistic towards each other, capable of committing horrible atrocities before facing the consequences.
I generally believe that everything in this episode is true. The Cylons were building up their forces, and the Colonials grew scared but inevitably sent Adama to the border, escalating the situation. However, even if Adama wasn't ordered to go there, the Cylons would have eventually come up with an excuse anyway since it's mentioned that they did have supposed encounters with Colonial rogues/pirates/thieves from time to time. No matter what, it wouldn't take much for an incident to take place. Essentially, everyone is correct, and everyone is at fault.
My problem with Adama's agonising over causing the war is that it clearly doesn't make any sense. We know the Valkyrie mission happens 1 year before the attack on the colonies as Adama says so, and we also know that Sharon was on the Galactica for 2 years before the attack. Adama would know that the invasion plans took years to prepare and execute, and just by logically thinking about the infiltrators on his own ship and how long they had been there he would know it was already underway long before his mission started.
That's awesome explanation 😎
ah yes, "Following Orders", the statement that forgives all crimes, especially the ones that the doer knows are unforgivable.
It's possible that Valkyrie was able to track and communicate with the stealth-star with some sort of directional laser communications instead of radio, you can still spot it of course but you'd have to be within line of sight of the transmitter which would mean being on the Colonial side of the line. Alternatively, and maybe more likely, your proposal of the Cylons knowing where to look could be facilitated by sleeper agents operating within the Colonial military, even onboard Valkyrie perhaps, we do know they were operating in Colonial space by this point.
Yes, but this two-way communication would still make sense only if the recon jet was expected to be lost, but needed to transmit back all gathered information, or if the rendezvous with the mothership wasn't set up in the first place due to enemy patrols or something, and needed to be determined during the mission.
The overlay of the hands was gold cracked me up.
well, could be narrow band coms like a laser. nothing can track or intercept that unless you literally get right inside the beam. plus in space it would be difficult to detect a small ship even if you knew exactly where it was unless it didn't move and you weren't almost on top of it. there is a lot of space in space.
Unfortunately, there's very little such thing as "stealth" when it comes to spacecraft because of one thing: heat. Getting rid of waste heat is one of the biggest problems that any spacecraft has, nevermind something like a warship or fightercraft. Yes, space is big - but we can already detect things not much larger than that stealth fighter all the way out in the Kuiper Belt, dozens of AUs out from Earth, based upon their infra-red emissions.
@@Maria_Erias True, but there's a difference between being able to detect something, and actually thinking to look for it.
I think it's possible that the Cylons didn't initially spot Bulldog. Perhaps they spotted the battlestar hanging out on the border and sent a ship to investigate. Then when it got there it was all: oh hey, there's a fighter over here.
Even if we very generously assume the Cylons were not also spying on the Colonials already I'd argue the Cylons violated the spirit of the peace treaty (if perhaps not the exact lettering) from day one by never sending a representative to the armistice station in 40 years.
Until later in the series when we find out that the whole invasion was just the cavil models being jealous and wanting to punish the 5... and he'd been planing the destruction of the 12 colonies for decades before. Considering how long theyl had been living as a humans.
In other words an existential temper tantrum.
@@Hartzilla2007 I mean it felt disappointing watching it at the time lol
It may have been a conspiracy, but they also may not have been wrong. The Cylons had a fully fledged first strike oriented fleet ready to go, just a few years after the incident. That implies they had been doing their own buildup. Possibly they wouldn’t have used it unprovoked, but that combined with the apparent religious imperative to return to the colonies seems to indicate war was coming regardless of the colonial actions.
given that cylons dont need a habitable planet, its highly suspect that they didnt just pack their shit and left the cyranus without any trace (or the local space). just their presence near colonial worlds is enough to suggest that they want a rematch. Also, the communication might be tight beam, that can be hard to trace
Cavil straight up says he started the war to teach the Final Five a lesson in the episode where Ellen revives.
Something similar was much better handled in the Wing Commander novel 'End Run'.
In the first part of the book a corvette is sent on a reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines. It goes wrong from the moment they enter the system as the Kilrathi have a very strong presence there. The corvette barley manages to evade the enemy fighters and hides in an asteroid field. There they discover the wreck of another corvette and their newly assigned intelligence officer spills that they had sent several corvette here before them and none returned.
Now comes the interesting part. Of course the Kilrathi keep an eye on the asteroid field, so the only way to get out alive is going directly to the jump point. No way they can do anything else without getting destroyed. So they rig a small asteroid with cameras and passive sensors. But it needs a human operator to decide when to send the data, which will alert the Kilrathi to the fact that the asteroid is a little more. Which also means that it's a suicide mission. The intelligence officer volunteers and keeps sending data until shot down. The corvette barely makes it out with the data.
And that's just the setup for a Midway-like space battle, which isn't even the main story of the book.
'End Run' (1994) by William R. Forstchen and Christopher Stasheff is in my opinion one of the best military science fiction novels written. You understand what is going on and why, you get the strategy despite the many things that go into the story and the tension rises more and more during the 'End Run'.
Sadly it was barely talked about when it came out.
I guess it's not talked much because the games it bases itself on have not aged well when compared to, hrrm, the X-Wing and FreeSpace titles, believe me.
I read another Wing Commander novel once, I could not believe how good it was, considering the brand
Cavil explained in season 4 his whole reasoning for the second war was to prove that Humanity was flawed and Cylons were supreme, he started the second Cylon war over thirty years prior when he dropped Colonel Tigh into the colonies, nothing the Colonials did or didn’t do would have changed a thing.
There's a range of available options between do nothing/make diplomatic contact and Total Atomic Annihilation. West Wing Proportional Response here
In theory. If each message is recorded, compressed, and then transmitted in a directional, frequency-hopping, burst transmission, there is a significantly reduced probability of intercept, or at least recognition that it is anything more than background noise. With that said, you should not be yapping away.
As to the Stealth Star being tracked by Valkyrie, optical tracking. It launched, Valkyrie locked optical tracking systems- yeah, telescopes, which they should have- on it and followed it. Especially easy if it had a pre-defined flight path to follow. And the Cylons could have spotted it when it occluded a star, and their own optical systems noticed.
Best explanation yet. And Battlestar Galactica uses a lot of VFX that look like optical telescope images, doesn't it?
@@Vinemaple It's also a method a lot of sci-fi seems to forget about. Everything has it's fancy pants sensor system for seeing outside, but the basic Mk1 Eyeball is limited to on-board use only.
When I thinking about it. It could be the Colonials' attempt to do a false flag operation, so they have a reason to go to war. The only problem (When looking from real life versions), is that the Cylons began the war first. As we know of course
TLDR - the Cylons had crossed the line and infiltrated the colonies thus knew about the stealth mission before it happened.
The reason the first Cylon War ended was because the First Cylons that told them to stop. The humans were slowly grinding the second Cylons down and by stoping the Second Culons got upgrades- but they never really wanted to stop.
Before that mission then Cylons had upgraded, infiltrated the colonies and set up the plans and ships to commit genocide. This mission was busted because the Cylons already knew and that was something the Humans had not considered- they had already lost a Cold War.
And now I need to rewatch BSG from the start. Yay!
“All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.”
All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again
how to break This genocidal loop?
@ oh the cyclical nature of time
With this, perhaps Spacedock may wanna talk about Babylon 5's "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars", with a little bit of The Canticle of Leibowitz and Turn A Gundam.
Because, as we learned in Caprica, "God" will make sure it happens. Especially if it looks like it won't. Neither Graystone's nor Vergis's companies were having much luck building an effective A.I. thousands of years after the departure from Kobol. Enter a Messenger manipulating Zoe Graystone into developing the software necessary to make it possible. Indeed, it had been grooming her since the house fire when she was a little girl and she grew to enthusiastically embrace the monotheist religion in addition to developing A.I. (under the Messenger's guidance) using the resources her tech baron father had in his home laboratory and her access to the V-World source code.
Ok I've had this discussion so many times. No, the Colonials DID NOT break the armistice. The Cylons did this when they failed to show up at Armistice station on a yearly basis. This was a breach of the Armistice agreement. ANY breach of the details of an Armistice can and will be consider a resumption of hostilities. Secondly, even though the Colonials didn't know this, the Cylons breached the Armistice line when they sent back the Final Five. If you'll remember, Saul and Adama had been friends since shortly after the end of the previous war, thus Cavil and his ilk had orchestrated and planned for the genocide of the Colonies since that time.
“Basestars can’t melt the Colonies.” -type title
Love y'all's BSG videos!
Great vid, thanks for keeping the BSG spirit alive. 😊
Food for thought: They never seem to worry about their DRADIS being detected by the Cylons. They never once addressed whether it was a passive or active system. Discuss.
Assuming DRADIS is a single tool (and not a collected suite of tools like radar, optical, electromagnetic, and IR sensors) I would imagine it needs to be active, otherwise achieving "stealth" would be as simple as turning off the source of whatever DRADIS detects.
Given the absolute size of both the Colonial Battlestars and the Cylon Basestars, the distances they engage at, as well as the relative emptiness of space, it may be that stealth at that scale simply isn't viable at detection and/or engagement ranges, and so detection via DRADIS is accepted as an inevitable part of ship-to-ship contact
I think it's a collection of active sensors that are put together to form a picture of the area nearby. My reasoning being as follows: Inert objects even when in motion are impossible to notice with passive sensors, so even a truck sized asteroid could move few tens of km/s and only be detected if it happens to be visually identified, which would be particularly hard in empty places without stars. So how do you keep your ship safe then? Only option is to send some form of radiation and measure and gather back-scatter, like normal radar does. This seems to be implied by the DRADIS screen refreshing in pulses.
What this means in setting then, it means that every ship is actively sending radiation to some area around them in lightspeed. However light travels 1 AU (astronomical unit) in roughly 8 minutes, so if the active sensor suite is visible to that range it means that it shows location of the ship at 16 minutes ago(8min to target and 8min back to sensor array), this is almost enough time to spool jump drives in a Battlestar not to mention Raptor and smaller vessels, that can jump several times in an hour. So even if they use active sensors all the time, seeing something 1km size in Solar system scales takes so long time that you have plenty of time to avoid danger, with faster than lightspeed travel available for everyone.
This also explains easily why they knew that Cylons were somehow tracking their movements when they jumped. Even if two massive fleets were to jump into the same Solar system, odds of being in engagement range or even in a range that they can detect each other is extremely low. For example if Colonial Fleet would jump today to the Jupiter, which is the largest mass object after the Sun in our Solar system we here on Earth would only be aware of them in average 40 minutes later (depends on the orbits, might be as big as 50min), if we had a capacity to detect their communications and knew where to look at as there's plenty of planetary bodies and even asteroids and stuff that might go in between, not to mention the background radiation and solar wind, which both dilute weak signals like that quite fast. And if they jumped into a nearby system it would take them several years to see anything that could be used to identify the fleet even if the popped high-yield nukes that rival in brightness with the host star of the system.
Now we don't know how long jumps they're capable of doing, but if we estimate that they can do 20-50Ly per jump they have access to more than 1000 stars per jump, so trying to find any ship or a fleet after only a one jump is going to be nigh impossible. So realistically you would only ever worry about your active sensors if you knew you would be jumping into a hostile system and trying to shut down all activity in a smaller ship, like engines, communications and only use minor thruster output to correct course/ rotation. Anything like Battlestar or Cylon Basestar sized would have all too much other signals, engines, heat emission, hell even optical signature as it occludes stars and other objects would be detectable, if you knew where to look at, or had something like 360 bubble scanning optical telescopes fitted around the ship and only searching for anything that moves. Regardless of spotting the thing, yes it could be done, but since observations are done in light speed at max and ships can move well over lightspeed it doesn't really matter, since you can swap the solar system the minute you think something sees you or you see something and after the jump it's impossible to track, unless you have someone onboard telling you where they went(which can be seen in almost every episode, where they take time after jump to relate their location to nearest stars with known location)...
*Colonial engineer:* Why don't we just build a big long range monitoring station with a giant Dradas, on our side of the armistice line?
....
Okay, then we strip out and retrofit a large FTL equipped ship to mount the long range sensors...
Ah, a BSG episode. Like a breath of fresh air. And the topic is one of my favorite episodes, too!
They even caused the first one too!
But seriously, if you think about the whole stealth recon mission, it was dumb. And the second war was inevitable, if there is one cause, that cause name is Cavil.
This is a pretty common and convincing theory to the way military leaders have acted throughout history. War not only brings political relevance and increased funding and prestige to the military, but accelerates promotions to higher pay grades, for officers who know how to play the system.
I will add that the Stealth-Star's position on the battlestar's plot could also have been merely an estimation based on its planned course.
Further, well below the read-more line, I will add that the initial attack in the Tonkin Gulf incident was based entirely on the assertion that the North Vietnamese PT boat was _behaving as if it had launched its torpedoes,_ according to the _Turner Joy's_ radar. There was never any confirmation that torpedoes had actually been launched. Source: _USS Turner Joy_ museum, Bremerton, WA.
After watching Lower Decks, I can only imagine the Cylons had numerous semi-stealthy patrols waiting behind the armistice line hoping to catch an excuse to return to war.
“Aw, dang it! Fine… we’ll lurk in the next sector over..”
Cylon of Athens was an Athenian Politician in the 7th century BCE. He attempted to take over Athens in a coup, but was thwarted in his attempt. This played an important role in the establishment of Athenian Democracy.
Of course, there's also the possibility writers often don't know jack shit about jack shit. They often just write stuff because it looks cool or sounds cool. They are often no different than kids playing make believe. But to those in the know or those with a passing knowledge of how things really work, the plot holes are glaringly obvious. "Hero" is a standalone episode with nothing in it that effects the overall storyline, and the incident along with the character "Bulldog" is never mentioned again, so I usually skip watching it.
Remember when it took Starbuck hours to figure out to fly that Cylon raider she found? How did Bulldog manage it while trying to escape captivity with a raider that was presumably still alive when he found it?
The Cylons kept Bulldog in a metal cage, but were kind enough to allow him to maintain his dreads?
Provocateurs.
I LOVE SPACESHIPS!
I just thought I should remind you guys
You chose quite possibly the best song in the entire Deadlock soundtrack. Kudos.
No, that's incorrect. It's explicit in the initial episodes that the Cylons have an absolute hatred for their creators.
Humanities extermination was the deliberate goal of the Cylons from the armistice. They had determined logically that preventing humanity seeing anything gave them the best possible chance of success.
Most Great Powers "spy" upon each other. Including Allie's.
This isn't an unfriendly act. It's more a case of verification, so amongst Allies it's tolerated to a certain degree.
Stated intentions.
Actual intentions.
Publicly stated capabilities.
Actual capabilities.
No capability to verify is a Red Flag. It's an absolute that the Cylons were doing the same thing.
Good theory. It seems like both sides were preparing for war, but the Colonials underestimated when it would happen.
tigh and the the others were all scatted around the 12 colonies some as early as 20 years before hand
i don't care about battlestar galactica, i'm only here for the spacedock
Clearly the mission didn't make a lot of sense. The Stealth star just didn't go anywhere deep enough to gather any useful intel. The writers made up their mind they wanted the Stealth star shot down, and they wanted Adama to be responsible for it. Clearly everything else was worked backwards from these objectives.
It would have been more realistic if it had been shot down by the Cylons deep in Cylon controlled space, and not just across the armistice line and all we get was a may-day call, with nobody knowing what happened to the pilot. You could then have Adama feeling guilty for handing the most advanced ship to the Cylons.
Cylons operating right up to the Armistice line would mean they would have know a lot more about Cylon military capabilities than was revealed to the public. They could have done a lot more with this.
I wouldn't go as far as suggesting this caused the second Cylon war, but it would indicate that the whole we haven't seen them for forty years was not true.
it's always the top brass that's causing problems
Given that the stealth ship was in constant radio contact, maybe they were never tracking it directly at all. It could simply have been sending updates of its current position back to the mothership.
Mutually Assured Destruction can be a self fulfilling prophesy
They could have been using laser comms -the Cyclons would have (more or less) had to physically intercept the beam to detect the transmissions.
Communication on that stealth mission was perfectly possible with a directed communication (laser) beam. At least over that distance. Stealthstar could also communicate its position that way.
No. The Cylons voted to start the war. It was their decision from the start, and they'd been preparing to do so since years before the Valkyrie's failed mission, given how deep the cover was on some of the Cylon infiltrators. Even if the Colonials HAD provoked the Cylons, it was still their choice to respond the way they did, with a war of complete and utter extermination. Not exactly a proportional response for what amounts to a petty border incident.
My only thought is that Valkyrie and the Stealthstar were in tightbeam laser communication range, since unless a Cylon ship strayed into its path there's not a lot to detect. Which wouldn't make much sense if the Stealthstar was meant to be on a long-range sortie, unless it was just to stay in communication for the initial deployment and then return after the mission was done. Can a Stealthstar fit an FTL drive? If you can put one on a Raptor, one can probably fit in a Stealthstar frame, but it kinda defeats the purpose of stealth if it lets off a big EM burst on arrival, unless it arrives at a range distant enough to dissipate the emissions, or it can move fast enough to outpace them, gather intel, and jump out before those emissions blow its cover. So that suggests whatever it was scouting would have been relatively nearby,
But otherwise, I always thought that the mission likely had zero impact on the Cylon decision to wipe out humanity. With the king of long-term planning they put on display just in the miniseries, there's no way they weren't already building their fleet of basestars and raiders, and it seems like Six was intimately involved in the defence mainframe infiltration which would have taken years anyway. Even the episode seems to insinuate that Bulldog's capture is extremely suspicious, and the events may have been orchestrated specifically to give the Cylons a test subject and also test humanity's willingness (and ability) to break the treaty. It might be when they specifically came up with their pan (not The Plan), but I can't believe they weren't already committed to human extinction.
Cavill would always have pulled the trigger. The entire "war" was one psychos temper tantrum.
But the Admirality gave him the perfect Casus Belli to convince even the reluctant Models.
Both times i watched BSG my understanding was that the admiralty was either probing the cylons (they should have detected the explosions) or trying a false flag op, trusting in Adama to let his heart win and try to either save or avenge his friend, thus after the incident he was demoted because they were dissapointed he followed procedure
In Daybreak (final episode) we see that Adama was given a loyalty test by some figures after this, it was for a transfer to working some desk job somewhere. The way it came off seemed more like a promotion to a more oversight role for spycraft stuff. Which suggests someone had plans for him if he played their game.
The communications could have been a pencil thin beam and so would be impossible for detections.
Toasters: Hmm whats this battle star doing right next to the armistice line?
“All this has happened before, and it will happen again…”
There also were the flights of the F-4 Recon Phantoms flying into Russia at very low levels. This would match the Colonial plan perfectly.
I wold like a video about how the earth federation are the true villains of Gundam UC
Love this video. Would also love for you to check out Alliance Space Guard!
It's a valid theory, and even if it wasn't, I still love seeing BSG content, I miss that show.
I wish instead of Caprica, they did a show based on the 1st Cylon war.
Their souls were bound by gravity as Char Aznable would say.
But no torch drives. My depression deepens.
Excellent discussion.
Yes. They created the cylons in the first place.
If you had a stealth vehicle in space, wouldn't it be possible for it to communicate using laser beams? This should not be detectable by forces that are not directly within the beam itself. This can also be used to keep track of the chip's location, so long as it kept accurately beaming back to the other ship. It would be hard to do this with multiple stealth ships though, and during any sort of evasive maneuvers, since if either lost track of the other's location, it would stop working.
yeah you could used laser pluses like fiber optics, they do this a few times in star trek and other sci-fi shows.
No , the nylons had alread broken the armistice and crossed the red line , tigh Ellen and Co had to br placed in colonial space, and they were always planning for war , their fleet was built for a first strike, the admiralty were right they were building a war machine,
The cylons knew they couldn't win a conventional war , also you forget the colonials had stealth technology in the first war ,
Holy shit that was Carl Lumbly I didn't clock that at the time and JLU just ended earlier that year
that's a really good theory and honestly has such a high chance of being real
Average toaster defender
Despite the shoot down of a U2 spy plane, war didn't start. The Soviet union and the United states realized theirs a big difference between sending an armed plane an unarmed spy plane. So no, it was not the Colonials fault. The Cylons were going to war no matter what happened.
Four decades of peace might have led to defence budget cuts...
The problem with this theory is that the Colonial Military never made use of this op's "failure" to go to war pre-emptively. The other issue is usually these things happen with "Cylons" attacking into Colonial territory, having it go this way might sneak past those looking at the Admiralty for "obvious" false-flag operations, but would still be a hard sell to the Colonial public that they flew in an illegal mission that got shot at and now we're stuck in a war guys, aw shucks.
Some new BSG content, lets go!
Nonsense in several ways.
1. Tight beam transmission are easy and get round the detection issue entirety.
2. Tight beam transponder only allows home to track them.
3. Spy operations aren't normally considered as an act of war.
the u-2 wasn't a stealth aircraft it just flew really, really high
1, The Cylons would have mentioned it.
2, The Cylons broke the agreement first by never showing up to that one station for continuing diplomatic talks.
I think it just gave Cavil and the Ones the opportunity to sway the Cylons that still weren't entirely onboard with his "destroy humanity" plan!!!! Keep in mind, that Cavil had already sent the Final Five to live amongst the Colonials by this time, so the Genocide was already in the works!!
ok that episode is a mandella effect for me. I had the original box set of all the seasons and that episode was not one of them. In fact the cylon fighter was captured after a battle where it had taken a round through the brain pan but not destroyed.
Maybe the Cylons could hear the bagpipes.
Awesome!
I don’t know if they actively provoked it, or intended to do so. Gathering some intel on what the Cylon’s were up to, or even if they were still over there at a time folk were pushing for a military downscaling doesn’t sound like an inherently terrible idea. And sheer bloody hubris can account for the sloppy job.
But, I think it’s entirely possible the action is what gave the Cavils the edge to push for war.
I don't remember this episode very well but the tracking and communications part seems ok and not odd to me. Seems like a Battlestar and a stealth ship could communicate pretty easily with focused directional beams or other tech. Todays F-35's have radar and other tech that is hard or even impossible to detect from a distance unlike previous generations of radar that just blasted out their location to anyone for hundreds of miles. Tv shows have to condense and shrink things to make the show move along, but if this was an actual real mission I would think the ship ranging far out in front of the Battlestar would be the best way to collect the most information without being spotted. Again, like an F-35 ranging out in front of an E-3 airborne radar plane that shows up on enemy radar hundreds of miles away even with its own radar turned off.
The best point you make I would say if the question of who actually shot him? There is indeed room for a conspiracy here on this point. IMHO
Thanks!
Did I completely miss this episode?!
Has Spacedock done any videos for the original 1979 BSG?
If you mean the humans created the Cylons then yes.
Why not an unmanned probe if they could track a ship anyway?
Always found it weird that Bulldog vanished after that episode.
Unless I missed him being killed or something?
I think it ends with him leaving the Galactica as a civilian so he prob went to another ship in the fleet we can only hope it was one that made it to the end.
I think the thinking on this is backwards. If the admiralty wanted to start a war with the Cylons their best bet would to arrange a false flag attack on their own ships or colonies. One of the real world examples is basically that a fake attack on US ships. If you are worried your enemy might be really strong you don't go and poke it to find out, you go and wail on them with a hammer. I think it would be more likely that cylon infiltrators are the ones to convince the admiralty to do something like this to convice the rest of the cylons the humans can't be trusted and must be destroyed. Since it seems like the cylons had been wanting a war for a long time (they never really wanted to stop fighting in the first place) then instigating a precived invasion is the more likley situation.
Like The cylons dont need habitable worlds they could had just left,they only stayed for round 2
Major Spoilers listed ahead in my comment. You’ve been warned.
It makes sense to me the other unknown ships appearing at the end were probably a Cylon patrol coming to investigate why explosions were happening on their side of the fence. Something to consider: we know the Cylons had human models in the colonies for a long while, Colonel Tye and Ellen going back over 30 years and no one questioning them just appearing out of nowhere with a full career and officer commission. Who isn’t to say Cavil didn’t make his way up into the military somewhere and gave the brass the stupid idea to hop across the fence and pull their pants down to show off a full moon skin job to start with? (Pun intended.) Whether Bulldog was shot by a friendly or a Cylon, Cavil could’ve orchestrated the whole thing, especially in getting the other models to follow along with his ideas since he was pushing for war. Heck, the guy poisoned off an entire model series (the Series 7 “Daniels” I think Ellen called them? Hence why we had 1-6 and then 8 and then the “Final Five” without a “7” ever being shown.) who were meant to be artists just because he didn’t like the idea of a Cylon existing that saw beauty in everything he despised-which was being human. He was cynical and calculating, the mastermind behind it all… until he literally blew his own mind out all over the C.I.C. in the finale. It also makes no sense to me that a “stealth ship” could have a missile fired at it, being “stealthy”, but again, it’s clearly on DRADIS… this is also assuming the missile Adama fired was a “fire-and-forget” like an Aim-120 Amram that uses its own radar to track a target and not a Boresight / Active Tracking missile like an Aim-7 Sparrow that relies on radar from the launcher. Just never sat right with me, that episode… but if Cavil was playing puppet master behind the scenes, playing both sides like Palpatine in the Clone Wars, it is still messy… but more plausible. After all, that movie was in theaters right around that time as well and quite a few writers tried to use the formula all over the media. (It took the animated Clone Wars to really pull it off, though… bring the same Canon helped, but stands alone as well.) So, yeah… I think Cavil played both sides without either side knowing. And what better way to get your own side to vote for war than to get a Battlestar to fire a missile across the border, even to destroy their own craft?
Coms could've been point to point laser
I highly doubt Bill Adama caused the Second Cylon War, I have no doubt Bill was justified in his feelings. The fact the Cylons build hundreds of Basestars for the Attack on the Twelve Colonies seems to imply a long build up, rather than a 2 year build up.
As for this mission, in universe I was surprised they’d use a stealth fighter (without any apparent FTL) and not an Orion Class Battlestar, which is built for stealth and can jump away if spotted. Though if the Colonials were looking to provoke a war, I’m surprised they’d go this route and not send an aging ship on accidentally jump into Cylon space and be lost trying to apologize.
The whole episode seems to be implying that Adama started the second war, and Adamma himself certainly believes that he did and feels incredibly guilty about it. But this whole episode is really badly written and violates the timeline that had already been set up over the previous two seasons. A Dama is on the Valkyrie one he’s already been said to have been on the Galactica for three years and yet the Valkyrie is two years earlier. None of it makes any sense. And then there’s the obvious technical problems that you’ve cited. I just wrecked this whole thing off as a worse than average filler episode.
RDM mentioned that he had wanted to do more with bulldog if the show had gotten more seasons, so I suppose it’s hypothetically possible that this episode may have been intended to set up something specific later in the series that they just never got around to (because it’s RDM) may have just decided to abandon.
I do wonder if bulldog survived all the way to earth
The problem is that this episode is a bit rubbish by BSG standards. It tells you this all happened 1 year before the attack on Caprica but we've known since the start of the miniseries that 6 was with Baltar for 2 years, and Sharon was on the Galactica for just as long, so preparations for the invasion were well advanced by the time of the Valkyrie mission.
Could the admiralty have been angling to increase their influence or at least spending on the fleet, sure since an armistice is not a peace and the complete lack of contact with the Cylons would have been very concerning. Make no mistake though, the Cylons had been preparing and laying the ground work for a war with the colonies for years before it happened, they were very much the aggressors based on all the information we have.
Eh, not so much. I don't think either sides are without fault here.
Both wanted the war on some level. Both wanted to test their warfighting against each other. Both were arrogantly believing they could do it without the other side knowing. More importantly, they were seeking confirmation they had the advantage.
As for the recon side? Eh, look, directional comms are a thing and I'm not expecting them to run completely dark on this one. Some of the time you need a little more range on your sensors, you need to just be close enough to detect it. Square Cube Law and all that.
It was the Cavil's I think that was just War war war war war, war now? What do you mean we're not going to war now?
And At least by implication, there was always an element to me made it feel this was retaliatory. I saw stuff like this happening all the time. It was the armistice line, the line fleets don't cross. The line capital ships don't cross.
Raiders, Raptors, Vipers, stealth ships? Nah guv, we ain't crossing the line, we're making sure you ain't crossing the line, that's why we're here. What do you mean we've crossed the line? We're ain't crossing no line guv.
Also, how did the Cylon infiltrators get into the colonies?
That armistice line was more like a guideline and a sieve. It had a lot of holes.
Any way, it's a TV show, it's not like breaking out ATP 3-90.1, FM 3-98 or FM 3-20.15 is going to make it better. Writers, developers frequently make sacrifices for the sake of narrative. For the implication of the narrative. For the story they want to tell, the characters present and the tonality of.
I'm a game dev, I do exactly the same thing.
I would be willing to bet Bulldog was not the first human to cross the line. I know the Cylons are machines but even they would prob not cry war any time some pirate/prospector/or lost pilot came over the line. Cylons know humans are not a unified hive mind who act on logic or programing at all times. Lone humans who crossed the line were ether destroyed or taken prisoner interrogated (and then prob killed). There would be no Red Cross sponsored repatriation but the whole human race wouldn't have been on the hook for it. It would have taken more than one little unarmed ship for them to think lets go to war.
No. Cavil did it all. We see that in the stand alone movies.
Yes. But obviously, the Cylons were building up.
I assume the stealthstar and Valkyrie were communicating via laser. Even if you're theory's true, the people who weren't in on the conspiracy would know that broadcasting on a stealth mission doesn't make sense.
Regarding the theory that the unknown contact was actually a colonial assassin, I don't really get what the admiralty's motives for that would be. If the goal is to provoke the cylons into starting the war then why blow up the stealthstar? If they could send a second stealthstar over the armistace line whose pilot was on board with the plan, then why not just send that ship deeper into cylon territory to attack a cylon target? All you'd really achieve by having it blow up the first stealthstar is paint a confusing and suspicious scene for the cylons, since they'd know it wasn't them who shot it down.
And if your goal is to manufacture a false flag attack to justify the colonials starting the war then, well how the hell would that work? The "victim" here was blatantly breaking the armistice and then the whole thing was kept top secret.
Also this isn't a point that you made, but others have. I don't think the cylons would be very suspicious to see a battlestar hanging out near the armistace line. They would probably assume it was there for the same reason they were, to patrol the armistace line for incursions and remind the other side of their presence. Like, neither half of Korea is suspicious to see tanks parked near the DMZ.
Anyway here's my theory. I don't know if I actually believe it but I like it. The goal of the mission wasn't to start the war, nor was it to actually look at anything. The goal was to determine if the cylons could even detect the stealthstar, and how they would respond if they did. However, in case the answers to these questions are "yes" and "badly", they send a second stealthstar to blow up the first one, and if they detect any signs of hostility from the cylons they send a message basically saying, "that guy went rogue and crossed the line without permission, so we had to send another guy over to blow him up. We're very sorry for the inconvenience and hope this whole incident between us can be brushed under the rug". What they weren't expecting is for the pilot to survive and the cylons to discover the true nature of the mission from him.
basically , 5 - star,,, you know they were bad... bad enough to start a war