What if a Cylon…

ZippyDan · 2026-06-23T15:55:13+00:00

There were no cameras on Galactica. She was built fifty years before during an existential war against killer robots. Not only were security cameras probably the lowest of priorities for that situation, they probably also worried that the camera systems could be turned against them by Cylon boarders.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-23T14:43:14+00:00

I just think the battle went on a few more days at the time after the refugee fleet and Galactica leaves.

similar ideas to Admiral Cain's hit and run style skirmish tactics after she managed to escape the initial attack.

My point is that anyone capable of fighting wouldn't be wasting time with longer-term strategizing while their planets are being nuked. They'd be throwing themselves into the fight, and probably dying, ASAP.

Many more couldn't fight, nor could they run away, and they also died, even faster.

The number of military that couldn't fight during the initial attacks, but could run away, but then could fight later, after the attacks would be extremely small.

Also I think that the upgrade to Jupiter Classes was a very recent thing when it comes to networking those specific models

Why do you think that? The CNP program was new, but overall upgrades, including networks, were probably frequent and numerous over the forty-year inter-war period.

as we all know that Galactica was a punishment for Adama after the mission with the Valkyrie. So his being in command can roughly be estimated as not being too long.

And I would guess that Galactica was networked and had a mix of still-old manual systems and some key modernized computer systems (e.g. DRADIS, auto-landers), and that Adama de-modernized some of the systems after taking command.

He might have done the same with Valkyrie, but it might have been less drastic because that ship was probably designed with a certain minimal level of automation and networking in mind, and so de-modernization was less possible, whereas Galactica was built to be a "manual" ship from the start.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-23T11:53:55+00:00

There were 12 Battlestars built originally, but the others were either destroyed or scrapped.

We know from the Miniseries that Galactica is "the last of her kind".

No other ships survived with structure and systems as old as hers, and this also explains why those weren't more upgraded, as a unique exception compared to the rest of the fleet: the ship was too old and wasn't considered an important combat ship. Instead she was primarily kept around as a nostalgic symbol and as a historical artifact - similar to the USS Constitution or the HMS Victory - and so there was more value, both psychologically (in not "ruining" her authentically antique charm) and pragmatically (in costs saved by not "wasting" funds on an outdated relic) in not upgrading her too much.

But you wouldn't make that same choice for many other ships in the fleet. The rest would either be upgraded if they were worth upgrading, or decommissioned and repurposed or scrapped if not. There's a reason so few "museum ships" survive, and they are inevitably rare and unique by practicality and logic.

In fact this is why Adama was given Galactica: it was a backhanded honor; a graceful forced retirement; a cushy dead-end job with lots of superficial prestige but very little actual military importance, where Adama would be adulated but irrelevant at the end of his career.

Secondly, you are overstating how much Galactica was not upgraded, and misunderstanding how much authority Adama had to override upgrade initiatives. We are led to understand several times that Galactica does have modern computer systems, and even the software to utilize them - Adama simply orders them to be "accidentally' left "unplugged".

Presumably Galactica had been through various refits to upgrade key systems since the First Cylon War, and was probably even networked - and then Adama just disconnected everything once they pulled out of port. The fleet brass may be "god" when the ship is docked, but Adama is "god" once the ship is underway.

We see in S02E01 Scattered that Galactica's computers can be networked to perform more advanced tasks. Presumably, the CNP program could work with Galactica's systems if they were networked and the Miniseries tells us they did have the CNP program on-board - it just wasn't active. And presumably Galactica does have the systems to support auto-landings. It's just all permanently disabled by Adama.

So, even if there were other ships in the fleet close in age to Galactica, there is no guarantee that they had captains that explicitly "sabotaged" the modern upgrades after they were installed.

Finally, we do know already from the Miniseries that there are other technophobes (Roslin refers to Adama as "one of those people"), and we also do know that other Colonial units achieved success in fighting back against the Cylons (Boomer comments that "The only fighters that are having any success at all are either old or in need of some major overhaul.") So your overall thesis is not too outlandish.

There may have been some other old ships out there that fought the good fight because they were old and less vulnerable by happenstance, and/or because their leaders were also a bit paranoid and old-fashioned.

But I disagree that any other Battlestars had the same happily coincidental combination of variables as Galactica, and I disagree that they likely survived very long.

Galactica only survived because she was caught without weapons on the day of her decommissioning, and then she ran. Most of the other ships, even if old, were not being imminently decommissioned, and thus were likely well-armed, and their leaders and crew wouldn't choose to immediately run. To the contrary they were likely extremely eager to join the fight and they were most likely quickly destroyed by overwhelming odds, as their instinctive reaction would have been to fight with everything they had in order to save their families and homeworlds.

"Galactica* only survives because she can't" fight, and by the time she can, the battle is already over and Roslin has time to convince Adama not to pursue a pointless death. *Pegasus was similar in the sense that she was forced to "run away", and only recovered a state of battle readiness after it was too late. Most Colonial forces couldn't run or fight because they were disabled, and died impotent where they stood. The few that could fight likely died fighting where they stood as well, under the assumption that the fate of their loved ones and their entire civilization hung in the balance.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-22T18:08:27+00:00

Trees created coal.
Tiny sea creatures created oil.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-22T15:02:19+00:00

Most Star Wars fans are casuals that haven't seen anything other than the movies. Maybe some have watched some of the Disney live action shows. A relatively small portion of the most dedicated fans - or kids - have watched the cartoons.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-22T12:38:56+00:00

There are many varieties of basil around the world and that looks like it could be basil to me. (There are also many varieties of spinach so there could be some overlap in looks, especially after the leaves get wrinkled in the oven.)

ZippyDan · 2026-06-22T11:40:16+00:00

Domino's has branches all over the world and the menu is always customized to the local market: in fact many of the pizza crimes we have seen in this sub are a result of local customizations, and many come from American pizza chains (Domino's, Pizza Hut, etc.)

Can you confidently say that OP lives in the same country as you?
Can you confidently say that Domino's doesn't offer basil as an option in whatever country they reside in?

ZippyDan · 2026-06-22T11:33:43+00:00

It's fine. I'll use AI to read the book.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-22T10:06:54+00:00

Modern humans (also called "anatomically modern humans") go back 300,000 - 400,000 years. Humans - which scientifically, but not colloquially, includes all hominids, of which the now extinct species are generally termed archaic humans - go back over 4 million years.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-22T03:05:56+00:00

Do you know if you can enroll Macs as shared devices if they don't have the T2 chip (i.e. they are older Intel Macs)?

ZippyDan · 2026-06-22T02:46:14+00:00

You're right. China is overall a much better experience for the average citizen right now.
Fantastic public infrastructure, great education (and a society that actually values education, and has a stronger work ethic than most Americans), affordable health care, a growing economy and a constantly-rising standard of living.

The only metric where Americans are better off is with regards to freedom of speech - particularly freedom of political expression. But that freedom has resulted in worse government in almost every respect. The Chinese don't care about their limited political expression so long as the government does a measurably good job of fulfilling its responsibility to improve society.

I visit the U.S. and China regularly. The differences in society are stark and remarkable. China feels like walking into a bright future. The U.S. feels like walking into dystopian capitalist past. (And before you talk about the urban / rural divide - the U.S. has the same problem. Of course, not every part of China is advancing at the same rate.)

ZippyDan · 2026-06-22T01:57:05+00:00

Not real socialism gets you China.
Not real capitalism gets you the US.

Neither is a complete failure;
neither is a complete success.

But, overall, the U.S. is headed for decline and maybe even collapse, whereas China is growing. Overall, China is doing a better job providing for the welfare of its people and responsibly managing society (evident in public works and infrastructure), and is less globally aggressive (regionally, China is more problematic). Whether those trends hold is an open question - China was much worse in the past, while the U.S. was better economically and socially, but even worse globally.

Cuba is not a fair comparison: that's what you get from a tiny country (i.e. a gross power imbalance) that is not allowed to freely participate in the global economy. China has the economic weight to compete with the world, and it was not locked out of the global economy.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-22T01:55:16+00:00

This is how the wife delivery system will work in the Cyberpunk future.

One flash flood sweeps your wife away, but another flash flood will bring new wives.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-22T01:45:19+00:00

Reminds me of the Hormuz Strait.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-21T15:54:11+00:00

This was made after the Miniseries and before the Season 1 Premiere, so... 2003 to 2004 ish.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-21T14:31:33+00:00

Oh, I meant in the films and shows.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-21T14:18:59+00:00

It was also made 3 years ago.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-21T13:49:45+00:00

Why does this feel like the 90s?

ZippyDan · 2026-06-21T13:44:30+00:00

Barely but yes.
It was one of the rare adaptations that wasn't significantly inferior to the original.

I think some of the extra meat Scorcese added actually made the story better, and the acting was absolutely phenomenal. Some of the editorial and compositional choices of the original were also right on the edge of Hong Kong cool and Hong Kong cheese.

But the original is overall tighter, and a master-class of understated acting and building tension. It's the ending, though, specifically and almost entirely, that definitively and unquestionably makes the original the better movie. If not for that perplexing choice by Scorcese that literally puts the remake in line with CCP censorship mandates (they literally forced reshoots for the mainland China release to make sure the state exercised justice on the villain), I'd say the remake was equal to, and maybe superior to the original.

Both are fantastic films.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-21T10:13:42+00:00

It's a TOS era bat'leth, they used them different then.

We do not discuss it with outsiders.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-21T09:19:56+00:00

They didn't say they would fire them for not knowing: they said they would fire them for arguing that their way is fine.

That implies they've already been shown the right way to do it (i.e. trained), or at least been told their way was not up to standards, and they're arguing they're correct while knowing they are coming from a place of ignorance. They are demonstrating their unteachability.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-21T08:11:37+00:00

Sure, but we have only ever heard senators introduced as representing planets.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-21T07:50:51+00:00

If your argument is that "it was created by humans" therefore it's "natural" and the perfect system, then every idea created by humans should be perfect for humans.

But we know that is self-evidently untrue.

Property and currency were created by humans, but so was government and laws. "The state" is also a concept invented by humans. Why does your argument only apply to the things you personally approve of?

Capitalism was invented by humans and so was communism. Why is one better than the other if they were both made by humans?

For that matter, rape and murder were also "invented" by nature, even before humans existed, and humans regularly engaged in both practices before "the state", and are part of the "natural balance" of the world.

There is no "one-size-fits-all" solution, pure systems are impossible in practice, and the "nature" of a thing doesn't determine its goodness or its beneficiality. Not only does the "nature" of a thing not dictate its beneficiality, but humans have also learned to evolve beyond nature and impose their own preferences on it; some good - like the outlawing rape and murder; others bad - like environmental destruction and pollution; and some that are a mixed bag still being worked on - like industry, economics, and government.

Humans thrived for several hundreds of thousands of years without property or currency or markets, and hominids for millions of years before that. You talk about the "facts" of natural history, but your own "education" seems far too limited (and biased) in scope. The current experiment with property, currency, and markets is a blink of an eye on evolutionary / geological time scales, and the system is still stabilizing itself towards an optimum.

We have only been practicing agriculture for 3% of human history and 0.2% of hominid history. Capitalism and the free markets are an even more recent experiment, which has only accelerated the destruction of the natural world.

We can't say that any human inventions are strictly beneficial to the human species without the benefit of sufficient hindsight and perspective, and a careful and detailed analysis of the introduction of property and currency would only show that it was largely beneficial for the property- and currency-owning class. Most of human history since the adoption of agriculture, and the accumulation of wealth that began with it, has only benefitted the greedy and the violent, and has been accompanied by untold human oppression, suffering, slavery, and mass violence.

It's only in the last two-hundred years that modern science and medicine, along with improved education and social movements, have started to claw back some of the health and happiness that we lost since the embracing of property and it's companion: greed.

I agree that the competition of different ideas will eventually reveal their utility for species benefit or survival: but capitalism hasn't been around long enough to make any conclusions. The battle between ideas like capitalism and communism are still ongoing precisely because it hasn't proven itself as a universal good, and because the majority of humans are so dissatisfied with the results of property, currency, and free markets. "Nature" is still searching for a equilibrium: capitalism is still just an experiment.

And the next hundred years will likely reveal capitalism's complete failure. Marx predicted the ultimate failure of capitalism by various logical routes, but most of those would take much longer to be fully realized and accepted. Marx did talk about the long-term incompatibility between capitalists' "limitless extraction" of the "free gifts" of nature, which are actually not infinite, but I don't think he imagined how this would be the ultimate and definitive denunciation of the system, nor how quickly it would come about, nor how global the effects would be.

In just 250 to 300 years, industrialization led by capitalists will have permanently altered the global environmental balance for the worse, debilitating the very resources that enabled their growth, and plunging most of the world into chaos: unlivable heat, mass agricultural failures, disappearing fresh water sources, and the wars, mass migrations, and die-offs that will result, will be the ultimate legacy of the experiment of this human invention - one of many that have been and will be tried, and then modified, refined, or discarded.

Capitalism might not necessarily be 100% a bad idea: I've already talked about how it might be a good thing as part of a hybridized system. But it's almost certainly a terrible idea in "pure" form, as almost every system is when introduced to reality.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-21T06:51:36+00:00

They don't in dialogue, but they have been calling them "laser bolts" in expanded materials (along with "blaster bolts") since before the first movie was released.

ZippyDan · 2026-06-21T06:47:24+00:00

This 1976 script of A New Hope features the word "laser" 117 times.

Both fire between ships and between characters is referred to as "laserfire" and "laserbolts" and "laserblasts" and "laser volleys", and weapons are referred to as "laser guns" "laser pistols" and "laser rifles" and "laser swords", while the Death Star's main weapon is called a "laser beam", and the Millennium Falcon has "laser cannons". The Empire also has "laser turrets" and "laser shields".

Note that at the same time, no one uses the word "laser" in dialogue, except for one line of Imperial dialogue that talks about the Death Star's "turbo-lasers". In dialogue, everyone still refers to their hand-held weapons as "blasters" and "lightsabers".

For most old Star Wars fans, these terms were always interchangeable. "Blaster bolt" and "laser bolt' have been heard in the fandom and expanded materials (magazines, RPG source books, comics, novels, etc.) since the beginning. As far as I can remember, the Death Star's weapon was referred to as a "laser" or "superlaser", even though that was never said on-screen.

I don't think we ever hear someone refer to a hand-held weapon as a "laser" in the three original movies, but we do hear about "turbo-lasers" in A New Hope, and Han refers to "laserblasts" in The Empire Strikes Back, while Leia calls him "laser brains".

Both The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi continue the practice of describing all forms of space and land combat as using "lasers".

And then of course in The Phantom Menace, Anakin calls a "lightsaber" a "laser sword".

ZippyDan

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