Cylons vs Skynet

[Srelex]

In a city ruin, Skynet and the forces of the nBSG Cylons are brought to rumble. Centurions and T-600s are put on in equal numbers, with the T-800s supported by T-1s and Hunter-Killers. The Centurions are supported by raiders, not armed with nukes, which are also restricted to the atmosphere. Who would win in this situation?

A few related questions:
*Could T-800s or T-1000s potentially masquerade as humanoid Cylons?
*Have any proper Cylon ground forces been detailed in nBSG media?

[Starglider]

Terminators have the edge in firepower and armor. We've seen centurions go down to normal gunfire - a few (in the boarding action) required explosive rounds to down. T-800s can just ignore normal gunfire; it takes heavy anti-material rifles or explosives to do serious damage to them, and even then they can take a lot of hits and keep going. They are using heavy plasma rifles that can down other T-800s in one shot, so I doubt they will have any problem blowing away centurions. Mobility and tactical intelligence, probably equivalent. The T-1s aren't going to be much use in a city ruin, but they can act as semi-mobile firebases. If by HKs you meant the ground tank-type HKs, the firepower and armor disparity is tilted even more in favor of the terminators.

In the air, things look better for the Cylons. Raiders have earth-to-orbit capability, are probably more maneuverable than the aerial HKs, have missiles and can in a pinch use their jump drives to escape a stick situation (in theory, though jumping in an atmosphere may be risky). However once they've used up their missiles, their guns are fixed-forward and quite weak; definitely not ideal for strafing. They can probably damage T-800s ok, but it's doubtful if they'll penetrate the armor on the HK-tanks or even aerial HKs. The Skynet VTOLS are built for close support work with multiple turreted heavy plasma guns; they will slaughter the centurions and if their guns can track the raiders the later's maneuverability advantage may be neutralised.

I'd say Skynet loses a few units to Raider missiles, but quickly scrap the centurions with a combined arms assault, taking negligiable loses. The raiders will move in for strafing runs and will manage to pick off a few T-800s, but be forced back by a hail of AA fire (mainly from the HKs and T-1 gatling guns, but with computer targeting even the T-800s will have a reasonable chance to hit low-flying aircraft). After a few raiders are downed the rest will jump away, leaving the last remnants of their ground force to be mopped up. If you allow the dubious-canon Skynet units that we saw in the games and novels, such as hypersonic aero-fighters and bombers, the Cylons would pose even less of a problem.

[Shroom Man 777]

The positioning of HK and T-1 guns is pretty lousy for anti-air work, however. Their upwards traverse sucks.

It depends on how the Cylon Raiders work in atmosphere. How maneuverable they are. One of the good things in Terminator 4 was that it showed that Aerial Hunter Killers kick ass, but then again intercepting not-so-maneuverable A-10s might not be much of a feat...

[starfury]

It depends on how the Cylon Raiders work in atmosphere. How maneuverable they are. One of the good things in Terminator 4 was that it showed that Aerial Hunter Killers kick ass, but then again intercepting not-so-maneuverable A-10s might not be much of a feat...

Well Aerial Hunter Killers are Helicopter/VTOL derivatives and Raiders are more fighter/Fighter-bombers based, so it was reasonable.

[Shroom Man 777]

Then again, Raiders are optimized for space combat. Their design isn't exactly aerodynamic. Have Raiders been seen operating in atmosphere, maneuvering or engaging in combat or anything else that might clue us in on how good they'd perform in air?

[NecronLord]

Then again, Raiders are optimized for space combat. Their design isn't exactly aerodynamic. Have Raiders been seen operating in atmosphere, maneuvering or engaging in combat or anything else that might clue us in on how good they'd perform in air?

It's seen in The Plan they're quite effective. They are aerodynamic - not great, of course, but passable. I think it's quite possible that a phased plasma gun would kill one if it hit its face, though, their brain and manouvering equipment seems behind an inch or so of metal there.

[Sea Skimmer]

The positioning of HK and T-1 guns is pretty lousy for anti-air work, however. Their upwards traverse sucks.

It depends on how the Cylon Raiders work in atmosphere. How maneuverable they are. One of the good things in Terminator 4 was that it showed that Aerial Hunter Killers kick ass, but then again intercepting not-so-maneuverable A-10s might not be much of a feat...

The A-10 is one of the most agile military jets around, it can easily out turn any modern supersonic fighter thanks to its straight wings and generally high on agility design. It’s just slow while it does it.

[Shroom Man 777]

Ah, my mistake then. In that case, the HKs are badass!

I'm still very doubtful about their capacity to engage the Raiders though. Do the Raiders have missiles? I seem to recall the HKs having missiles in Terminator 4, and even if it didn't, the HKs still had weapons that were capable of anti-submarine warfare as well as bridge-wrecking. They'd definitely have enough firepower to fuck a Cylon fighter over.

[Sarevok]

Raiders in an atmosphere have less firepower, accuracy, range and speed than a ww 2 fighter. Hks would eat them alive then recycle them for being waste of metal.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Raiders in an atmosphere have less firepower, accuracy, range and speed than a ww 2 fighter.

That statement smells like hyperbole to me. Let's see:

1. Firepower. Probably yes if we take an "average" WW2 fighter. Probably about the same as a poorly armed WW2 fighter.
2. Accuracy. Most WW2 fighters had fairly primitive gun sights, so I doubt it. Difficult to quantify without some kind of comparative testing, though. Accuracy of WW2 fighters was very dependent on pilot skills.
3. Range. Range of WW2 fighters varied considerably, but let's consider something from the top end. The P-51D had a range of about 1,600 miles with drop tanks. You are saying that the raiders have a smaller range in atmospheric flight?
4. Speed. How do we calculate the speed of atmospheric raiders? Strafing scenes are not useful since they probably would not strafe at maximum speed.

[Batman]

I very much suspect he meant weapon range there.

[Sarevok]

Yep I meant weapons range. I will try to get some screencaps later. In the mean while for Marcus Aurelius I will note

- Firepower : In the Plan a Raider fired upon a human. There was less damage than most movie handguns used by action heroes. The body was not even bleeding. This is not an isolated incident. In season 2 episode "The Farm" a heavy Raiders fails to destroy a centurion after several seconds of firing. A centurion is somewhat ougher than an unarmored human. But they can still be easily dispatched by one single pistol round.

- Accuracy ; Raider inaccuracy is legendary. In space combat they are worse than worst depictions of TIE fighters in star wars EU. They consistently manage to miss from a hundred meters away every time.

Against ground targets Raiders are wisely almost never used because how much they suck. Rocks thrown from slingshots have good chance of hitting one due to how low, slow and close they must get. The colonials who have superior weapons have to approach within 50 to 300 feets before firing guided missiles as seen in new caprica battle or withdrawal from kobol or attack on cylon tylium refinery. Raiders are less effective in air strikes than dropping stones from a hot air baloon.

Weapons Range - covered. See above.

[Srelex]

Yep I meant weapons range. I will try to get some screencaps later. In the mean while for Marcus Aurelius I will note

- Firepower : In the Plan a Raider fired upon a human. There was less damage than most movie handguns used by action heroes. The body was not even bleeding. This is not an isolated incident. In season 2 episode "The Farm" a heavy Raiders fails to destroy a centurion after several seconds of firing. A centurion is somewhat ougher than an unarmored human. But they can still be easily dispatched by one single pistol round.

Wait--what have we seen of their firepower and space, against Vipers and whatnot? I think I remember them killing Colonial fighters with their machineguns, so could it be that in that incident they were simply using a lower caliber?

[Sarevok]

Reposted from another post I made recently.

BSG fighter guns are very weak. They do less damage than some machine guns used by infantry today. See this strafing run by a Cylon Raider from the recently released "The Plan" movie.

Here we can see the Raider starting it's attack run. It's close enough to be seen by the naked eye by observers which is normal in BSGverse. Generally Vipers and Raiders close within less than a hundred meters of a ground target before they attack.

http://www.snailmailbd.com/personal/attack01.jpg

Now the Raider starts firing. Notice the faint amount of damage produced on the ground.

http://www.snailmailbd.com/personal/attack02.jpg

A human gets hit by the Raiders weapons. He does not burst into a gory mess one would expect from an aircraft cannon much less a spacecraft weapon.

http://www.snailmailbd.com/personal/attack03.jpg

Infact he seems rather intact and fine after dying.

http://www.snailmailbd.com/personal/attack04.jpg

[Srelex]

Well yes, but what other times have we seen those weapons in action? That's what I want to know.

[Sarevok]

Well there was the aforementioned heavy raider and centurion. There is also another instance of Raider gunfire ineffectiveness but this one took place in space. In season 2s "The Sacrifice" a Raider blew apart glass window on a passenger ship. I don't know what material civilian spaceship glass windows use. But the effect was quite mediocre. Plus you have the Raiders in New Caprica battle in season 3s "Exodus". But they were mostly useless there buzzing around the sky randomly and not being able to kill anything. The Centurions were the only ones who put up a real fight. Out of all the people running on the ground I don't think a single one got hit by a Raider.

[Srelex]

Alright, thanks. Now onto another part of the OP that hasn't been addressed: who has better infiltrators? Could the two sides infiltrate one another with their respective skinjobs? While T-800s are easier to detect, they are much more capable of resisting if rumbled...

[Sarevok]

Cylon infiltrators are way better because they are human clones with some implants. The whole "toaster" designation only served to confound humans about what they really are. Early on the fleet had no idea how to catch a skinjob since they were looking for robots disguised as people. But actually they were infiltrated by people with some robotic implants - cyborgs essentially. Cylons should prove nearly impossible for human resistance in Skynet Earth to detect unless they knew what they are looking for. Against Skynet ? I doubt it. Skynet built T-8xx series cyborgs. It has very good concept of how the human body works and slight deviations in synthetic equivalents. Pretending to be a lost T-8xx model is going to end with the Cylon in the same dissection lab where Skynet studied humans first to build terminators.

Can Skynet T-8xx series fool Cylons ? Probably not. Pretending to be Cylon is out of the question since all the Cylon models are well known and catalogued. Skynet would have to reverse engineer and build it's own skinjobs. Pretending to be human might work though. Cylons don't care much about human prisoners. A highly social Terminator like Cameron could live in a place like a Cylon prisoner camp without fuss.

So in short neither side could infiltrate other effectively due to their unique advantages

[Khaat]

SkyNet Terminators and Cylon infiltrators would both be equally ineffective for their primary role of infiltration. In their role of "mistake me for human", the Cylon infiltrators do work better (undetectable, completely un-robotic), but in a SkyNet vs Cylons fight, skinjobs lack the heavy-handed combat ability of T-800s.

Cylons know the 12 models on sight (well, okay, not the Final Five). T-800: busted! But then they have to kill it. Good luck with small arms!

Cylon infiltrators try to work into SkyNet? Not so much: they look like humans, the primary target of opportunity. And are about as easy to kill. But Cylons could possibly hack a defeated SkyNet resource (downed aerial H/K, dismembered/shut-down T-800....)

[Starglider]

[quote="Khaat"But Cylons could possibly hack a defeated SkyNet resource (downed aerial H/K, dismembered/shut-down T-800....)[/quote]

They could just as easily get hacked in return. Given Skynet's insanely good R&D capability (nanotech assassins and cyborgs and plasma guns and time travel in 20 years while building an infrastructure from scratch!) the Centurions and data fonts will probably be easy to crack. Raiders and organic cylons maybe a little longer, but Skynet also has ample experience with brain-computer interfacing (as evidenced by the hero in the 4th movie, the 'Infiltrator' books etc). We know the human resistance can reprogram terminators if they manage to physically disable them (or find them shut down), but Raiders have been shown to be disabled en mass by nothing more than a coded signal. This could go either way but frankly my money is on Skynet (again).

[Sarevok]

Where do the Cylons are good hackers brain bug comes from ? They entire nBSG plot hinges upon Gaius Balter willingly sabotaging Colonial. It is a very stupid military if it can be brought down by one man. But even with Colonial incompetence the Cylons needed outside help. Every piece of equipment that had Gaius Balters handywork removed was immune.

Skynet on other hand would hack Cylons with ease. Cylons have no idea about how their technology works. They do not even understand what their baseship pilots, the hybrids, are saying. When the cylon death stars hybrids were hacked and tricked into shutting down weapons Cylons were completely confounded. Cylon idea of a firewall is faith in cylon god so I think given a few days to study Cylon tech skynet could take over the entire cylon fleet.

[Starglider]

Where do the Cylons are good hackers brain bug comes from? They entire nBSG plot hinges upon Gaius Balter willingly sabotaging Colonial.

The Cylons managed to hack into Galactica's LAN, when they lost the fleet and Gaeta had to temporarily network all the computers. This was after they supposedly flushed the tainted software. Either the Colonials are monumentally incompetent (somehow, plugging a LAN together with bulky cables creates a Cylon-friendly wireless access point !?!) or there was additional physical sabotage to Galactica's systems that they didn't know about.

It is a very stupid military if it can be brought down by one man.

Normally I would say that superintelligent AI can easily create tainted code that will pass all reasonable human inspection and peer-review (for systems of this scope and complexity). However you're correct that the Cylons didn't seem to do anything like that. Their attack appeared to rely on Colonial complacancy and incompetence more than stunning programming skills.

Cylons have no idea about how their technology works. They do not even understand what their baseship pilots, the hybrids, are saying.

Much as I dislike organo-tech-wanking clones-pretending-to-be-androids, that is a little excessive. While it is hilarious that they managed to build and operate a huge ressurrection system without understanding it, they seem to be ok with repairing and redesigning the rest of their equipment. The hybrid babble thing is an unintended side effect; they're designed to run the ships, which they do reasonably competently, the prophecy nonsense probably wasn't in the design spec.

[PeZook]

Where do the Cylons are good hackers brain bug comes from ? They entire nBSG plot hinges upon Gaius Balter willingly sabotaging Colonial. It is a very stupid military if it can be brought down by one man. But even with Colonial incompetence the Cylons needed outside help. Every piece of equipment that had Gaius Balters handywork removed was immune.

They could hack Galactica remotely as soon as they built a network on their computers. Which, granted, either shows that Colonial computer security is a total joke, or that Cylons are OMGAWESOME hackers, since they can circumvent inconveniences like a physically isolated network (seriously, the Galactica physically connected its main computers with cables, and they could still hack the network and upload a virus)

[RecklessPrudence]

Now, I don't want to start defending nBSG, as I got sucked into it and was a devotee for quite some time until I got completely disgusted with it (should probably watch the rest of Season 4, sometime), but I think the reason that Galactica could be hacked once Gaeta networked everything together was that he networked everything together, including the computers handling the sensor arrays. Apparently this allowed the Cylons to pulse signals at it and use it as a gateway to the rest of the Bucket's computers.

Also, the reason the 'old-school' Commanders and Admirals were so wary of networking anything on their ships, and Baltar's program was only given the green light over much protestation when the politicians got involved (as a more automated fleet = less active military members = less paychecks coming out of the government's coffers - supposedly), was because apparently the Cylons are that shit-hot at hacking. According to something I read ages ago on a BSG-related site, a comparatively huge number of Colonial losses in the First Cylon War were due to compromised computer systems - whether that was shutting down life-support or point-defense, or taking control of the helm and ramming another Colonial ship, or turning the Colonial's weapons on one another - all this was until they went back to non-networked, easily over-ridden, mostly manual systems. Most of the officers who remembered those days were terrified of a repeat of all that if they ignored what they learned and the Cylons came back.

Of course, how realistic most of this is is up for debate (I mean, who puts life-support and comms/sensors on the same network?), but still, if I'm not making this all up out of sleep-deprivation, in-universe that's what happened.

[Shroom Man 777]

You forgot that the Cylons had the advantage over the Colonials because up until after humanity had its cunt punched, nobody knew the Cylons had humaniform infiltrators having secksytime with their dorky amoral dweeb womanizing scientist geniuses and possibly other facets of their military-industrial complexes. Cylon intelligence's infiltration of nBSG humanity was systemic, like if they managed to steal the Enigma Machine from the Nazzies or something. Maybe even worse.

This is not the case with Skynet. I mean, Skynet won't be using Colonial shit nor Cylon shit, so the Cylons can't magically "hack" them.

That's like some dweeb played by Jeff Goldblum managing to defeat an alien invasion by suddenly creating a computer virus out of the blue with his shitty Apple computer, when we all know Apple computers are shit. Apple computers can't even play Windows video games, so how can they work on alien ray shields? It just works? I hope those tentacled ID4 aliens strangle that obnoxious prick in those Apple commercials.