Battlestar Galactica Map Released

[Zed Snardbody]

Link

Here's your exclusive first look at a new star-map of Battlestar Galactica's Twelve Colonies, designed by writer Jane Espenson and science advisor Kevin Grazier. And Espenson and Grazier explained to us how twelve colonies can fit in one star system.

Similar to the Firefly Map that was put out a bit ago. Interesting to see the set up.

[Gandalf]

So I guess when the Basestar hybrid described twelve battles across three stars, it miscounted.

Otherwise, fascinating.

[Sarevok]

lol. If only the actual series followed said map faithfully.

Caprica and nBSG looked just like 20th century America. Any notion Galactica took place in a fantastic trinary star system with vistas as awe inspiring as Larry Riven's Ringworld is just too much geeky for the soap opera crowd. They don't want alien nightscapes with multiple suns in the sky or complex backstory of multiple Earths and parallel human civilizations on them.

Moar Starbuck/Anders/Lee luv triangle pls !

Seriously if the writters actually played straight with the SCIENCE part of Capricas backstory that alone would have vastly improved everything. Imagine how fantastic it would be to live in one of those twelve colonies of Kobol. With multiple suns in the sky and artificial lifeforms walking around.

[Vehrec]

Am I crazy, or does this system look far too regular to be anything but an artificial construct? Two terrestrial planets at the Trojan points of a Gas Giant? Two planets orbiting each other? Two pairs of binary stars in stable orbits that don't smash their planetary systems into dust? It's either unique, or a sign of the Lords of Kobol.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Or the third and most likely option...
The makers of the map/show know NOTHING about steller astronomy

[Sarevok]

Except the show never followed any of it. nBSG "science" is about as hard as your typical pew pew raygun space opera. Not that its a bad thing at all but given the setting they wasted plenty of chances for showing some amazing scenery.

[Solauren]

Those systems have to be artificially constructed.

There is no other way to explaining that many 'Class M' planets occuring in that close a proximity.

[Samuel]

Except the show never followed any of it. nBSG "science" is about as hard as your typical pew pew raygun space opera. Not that its a bad thing at all but given the setting they wasted plenty of chances for showing some amazing scenery.

I don't see how you would show these things. It would be like showing the solar system in any realistic fiction. Aside from the Sun and the Moon, most of the rest is irrelevant. They did do the reseach as the interview shows.

On the map itself...
Apparently Picon is filled with social democrats who provide healthcare and housing.
Virgon is a constitutional monarchy.
Aerilon is a shithole.
Canceron is like America, only huge and more functional.
Sagittaron hates fun.
They have their own "is Persephone a planet or a dwarf planet controversy"
Each world has a patron God.
13 habitable worlds... impressive.

The neat thing about the set up is that since all the worlds are so close you don't need FTL. If you get to .05c you can get between the systems in 3 years. Honestly the setup seems wasted for Battlestar Galactica because it all gets destroyed.

[Metahive]

Those systems have to be artificially constructed.

There is no other way to explaining that many 'Class M' planets occuring in that close a proximity.

Artificially constructed might take it a tad far, "terraformed" might be the better suggestion.

[Zac Naloen]

Just because the planets exist in those orbits now (or then) it doesn't mean they formed there. They could have formed somewhere else and over time drifted into those positions.

[jollyreaper]

Good point about not really needing ftl.

We assume they had a tech crash after they arrived or else their religious mythology would be properly documented history. They must have crashed hard enough that there weren't even that many artifacts left from their arrival, not even the mothership.

So they had to rediscover their tech. Ok. But why ftl? Useful for interplanetary travel? Yeah. But it can also go interstellar. WTF? Why develop that when you don't need it? Or if ftl is relatively easy and long range comes with it, why were there no long range expeditions in the first place? Given the premise, there was no human presence beyond the colony stars.

If civilian ships can go interstellar if push comes to shove and if habitable planets are out there, why weren't they founding new colonies? I'm not sure there was ever an in-universe answer.

[Vanas]

Even a long time ago and far, far away it looks like you can't keep the English and the French from spontaneously forming empires and then spending a millennium at war.

Still, 486 outposts, bases and habitats around. Not too shabby there, I wonder if there's any outside of this star system.

[Eternal_Freedom]

As for the "why aren't there expiditions out there," until the start of the First Cylon War the Colonies weren't united and quite probably fought or opposed each other. Then when they finally do unite they have a brutal 12 year war, followed by 40 years of not wanting to go too far out of the system(s) in case they encounter the Cylons again and start War number 2.

I have no idea whether the colonies united as a result of the Cylons, or the Sylons revolted because the Colonies unified. At any rate, they happenned at about the same IIRC.

[sirocco]

Good point about not really needing ftl.

We assume they had a tech crash after they arrived or else their religious mythology would be properly documented history. They must have crashed hard enough that there weren't even that many artifacts left from their arrival, not even the mothership.

So they had to rediscover their tech. Ok. But why ftl? Useful for interplanetary travel? Yeah. But it can also go interstellar. WTF? Why develop that when you don't need it? Or if ftl is relatively easy and long range comes with it, why were there no long range expeditions in the first place? Given the premise, there was no human presence beyond the colony stars.

If civilian ships can go interstellar if push comes to shove and if habitable planets are out there, why weren't they founding new colonies? I'm not sure there was ever an in-universe answer.

Well the map mentions that Gemenon is the first colony. And from what we saw in Caprica, it's not really the most advanced of the Twelve. On the contrary, the Geminis (?) are traditionalists.

So one could assume that:
- either they had a severe tech crash on their arrival to Helios Alpha system
- or that after having left Kobol and traveled 2000 lightyears (probably with no FTL or very poor FTL drives) they did the same thing that in the last episode of nBSG i.e leaving behind most tech

Whatever the case, as time passed, some Geminis just grew apart from the rest and left for the other planets, using whatever spaceship left from the initial flight.

Note: there are too many unanswered questions on Kobol: who were the Kobolian gods, were they human or as different from them as the humans are different from the cylons, what caused their demise and finally how did the humans get to Gemenon and later the other Twelve Colonies?

[Samuel]

Appologies to Destructionator. It does mean that it would be easier to convince people to pay for STL transportation though- Ha and Hb are only 9.45 billion kilometers apart! That is what- .001 light years?

Even a long time ago and far, far away it looks like you can't keep the English and the French from spontaneously forming empires and then spending a millennium at war.

Still, 486 outposts, bases and habitats around. Not too shabby there, I wonder if there's any outside of this star system.

Yeah, but those only hold 1,417,000 people- that works out to about 3,000 each. There are 3 planets that they could be on, all in the Hb system.

As for the "why aren't there expiditions out there," until the start of the First Cylon War the Colonies weren't united and quite probably fought or opposed each other. Then when they finally do unite they have a brutal 12 year war, followed by 40 years of not wanting to go too far out of the system(s) in case they encounter the Cylons again and start War number 2.

I have no idea whether the colonies united as a result of the Cylons, or the Sylons revolted because the Colonies unified. At any rate, they happenned at about the same IIRC.

But than the would have a larger incentive to explore. I think the best explanation is fuel is expensive so that going out to explore simply wasn't worth it because colonizing other planets and shipping things back would cost to much.

Well the map mentions that Gemenon is the first colony. And from what we saw in Caprica, it's not really the most advanced of the Twelve. On the contrary, the Geminis (?) are traditionalists.

So one could assume that:
- either they had a severe tech crash on their arrival to Helios Alpha system
- or that after having left Kobol and traveled 2000 lightyears (probably with no FTL or very poor FTL drives) they did the same thing that in the last episode of nBSG i.e leaving behind most tech

Whatever the case, as time passed, some Geminis just grew apart from the rest and left for the other planets, using whatever spaceship left from the initial flight.

The map mentions that Gemenon has a harsh climate and the people have generated several religions and the ensuing religious conflict between them.

[dworkin]

Unlike most SF franchises the nBSG was established as being largely barren and lacking in habitable worlds. Over four seasons how many habitable worlds did they find? Five? Of those, one was an iceball, one was marginal, one went up when the star went bang*, one was a radioactive cinder and the last was built by the Magretheans.

*However, like most SF franchises stars can spontaneously explode for no adequately explained reason.

They didn't go anywhere else because there wasn't anywhere else.

[jollyreaper]

But it can also go interstellar. WTF? Why develop that when you don't need it?

If they go 1/10 of a light year every 33 minutes, that's an average of about 1500x the speed of light. The drive could be intended to be used to go anywhere in the system in a single jump and be quickly reusable for military reliability, but they just never wanted to apply it to a straight line journey before since they have everything they've ever wanted locally.

This is the kicker. I granted above that we could give them FTL. If they can do jumps from within a planetary atmosphere, it makes me wonder why they have to go into space in the first place -- couldn't the "ship" just be a box with a drive that jumps planet to planet? But regardless, consider how Colonial One was laid out. If we consider modes of transit, trains tend to provide more standing and moving room than airliners and passenger liners will have even more room than trains. Part of this is for sheer necessity. Some train trips can take days. Most plane trips are only a few hours though those transoceanic flights can get rather long. But the airlines don't want to give up the seats to provide more walking room. Anyway, the point is that Colonial One's seating arrangement implies that the flights aren't all that long. Even if it was appointed like Air Force One in every detail, we're talking airplane travel times of under 24 hours usually. The longest scheduled flight right now is 18.5 hours. Passenger liners take a lot more time than that and correspondingly need more living space.

The point I'm getting at there is we can infer the typical operational range based on the layout of Colonial One. And unless their power supplies on these ships are like our nuclear warships where you're talking about going years between refueling, you're not going to carry more fuel onboard than you need to make your trip. And even if you did, there's still the matter of consumables. The limit for endurance on our nuclear subs is running out of food, not fuel. (That and the crews bouncing off the walls if you leave them out too long.)

So it seems very odd to me that ships designed to poke around in one star system or one tightly-packed cluster will just happen to have the range to go tens of thousands of times beyond their original operational radius. Now you might point out that I could have a little sub-compact car that only scoots around town but I could also hop in that car and drive from Key West all the way up to the furthest reaches of Alaska. True. But that's also with me picking up food and fuel all along the way. If you drop me into the post-apocalypse and ask me to do that, that's a whole different story.

They had a plotline about mining more of their not-really-explained power ore. Not much was explained about how they were handling the food situation. There were some sops to it with the algae planet and other poorly specified ideas but few explained how they were keeping themselves in booze and ciggies for all that time.

As for having everything they wanted locally, do you really think that would stop someone with a bug up his ass to go exploring? Ships seemed to be fairly affordable in the BSG setting, certainly on par with someone being able to buy a commercial vessel on Earth. If their telescopes are as good as ours, they should have been able to detect Kobol from any observation platform in the colonies. They would have seen the oxygen-rich atmosphere and someone would have wanted to go out there and see what it was all about. If that would have taken an effort on par with the Apollo Project then yeah, it takes some political will to make that happen. But the jump could be made with a cylon raider. Civilian ships were able to make it to Kobol. If an environmentalist can buy his own ship to go hunting whalers in the Antarctic, you don't think a religious group could get the scratch together to buy a ship and go looking for Kobol? Or maybe scientists intrigued by that planet?

BSG's setting is what it is. But this does seem like a bit of an oversight. The same might possibly apply to Firefly depending on how everyone got to that one big solar system. If everyone was on STL sleeperships and there's no real FTL in the setting then yeah, that could explain why everyone's in that one system and never go outside of it.

[jollyreaper]

Unlike most SF franchises the nBSG was established as being largely barren and lacking in habitable worlds. Over four seasons how many habitable worlds did they find? Five? Of those, one was an iceball, one was marginal, one went up when the star went bang*, one was a radioactive cinder and the last was built by the Magretheans.

*However, like most SF franchises stars can spontaneously explode for no adequately explained reason.

They didn't go anywhere else because there wasn't anywhere else.

Kobol looked beautiful and was right next door. If you have twelve examples in one solar system, you'd wonder if people might go looking for more. That's all I'm saying.

[Samuel]

If they can do jumps from within a planetary atmosphere, it makes me wonder why they have to go into space in the first place -- couldn't the "ship" just be a box with a drive that jumps planet to planet?

Maybe jumping into or from an atmosphere caused wear and tear on a ship? After all, it is moving into an area that is already occupied by matter.

So it seems very odd to me that ships designed to poke around in one star system or one tightly-packed cluster will just happen to have the range to go tens of thousands of times beyond their original operational radius.

Maybe refueling times a long time and fuel has a low relative weight so that having large fuel tanks is an economic investment for transportation.

Not much was explained about how they were handling the food situation. There were some sops to it with the algae planet and other poorly specified ideas but few explained how they were keeping themselves in booze and ciggies for all that time.

Booze is easy. I'm not sure where you would grow tobacco though. Who brings tobacco leaves aboard a spaceship?

If their telescopes are as good as ours, they should have been able to detect Kobol from any observation platform in the colonies. They would have seen the oxygen-rich atmosphere and someone would have wanted to go out there and see what it was all about.

Shit, that is a good point. And you have an entire system of people who believe it is out there and who want to find it... Maybe Kobol didn't have an oxygen atmosphere at the time the light that reaches the colonies was emited? Or is this a bit of a plot hole?

[jollyreaper]

If they can do jumps from within a planetary atmosphere, it makes me wonder why they have to go into space in the first place -- couldn't the "ship" just be a box with a drive that jumps planet to planet?

Maybe jumping into or from an atmosphere caused wear and tear on a ship? After all, it is moving into an area that is already occupied by matter.

Dunno. I like having to go out to space to travel but any jump drive could just go from surface to surface if there's no explanation, just like the TARDIS. Even more problematic is the concept of multi-jumping in short succession. In earlier episodes it was assumed that a ship just couldn't turn around and jump quickly, the drives had to be spooled back up and so on. But later we have the example of the Galactica double-jumping with the whole atmosphere trick. So that makes you reevaluate older battles and wonder why we didn't see that. The real explanation is "the writers make it up as they go." That's the same reason why hybrid baby blood cures cancer only it doesn't, writers made that up as they went.

So it seems very odd to me that ships designed to poke around in one star system or one tightly-packed cluster will just happen to have the range to go tens of thousands of times beyond their original operational radius.

Maybe refueling times a long time and fuel has a low relative weight so that having large fuel tanks is an economic investment for transportation.

That's a bit of a reach and doesn't explain the consumables.

Not much was explained about how they were handling the food situation. There were some sops to it with the algae planet and other poorly specified ideas but few explained how they were keeping themselves in booze and ciggies for all that time.

Booze is easy. I'm not sure where you would grow tobacco though. Who brings tobacco leaves aboard a spaceship?

Especially in a future where cancer isn't cured yet.

If their telescopes are as good as ours, they should have been able to detect Kobol from any observation platform in the colonies. They would have seen the oxygen-rich atmosphere and someone would have wanted to go out there and see what it was all about.

Shit, that is a good point. And you have an entire system of people who believe it is out there and who want to find it... Maybe Kobol didn't have an oxygen atmosphere at the time the light that reaches the colonies was emited? Or is this a bit of a plot hole?

An atmosphere isn't something that changes that quickly -- well, it can go bad quickly if something bad enough happens but it takes a long time to recover. It looked like Kobol's not had much trouble for many, many years.

Now what would have been an interesting explanation for how they're able to survive out in space is if they made Galactica more than a carrier. In modern times, aircraft carriers serve as major support vessels for the battle group. Some nukers actually carried bunker fuel for the escorts. They also have extensive medical facilities, machine shops, and help keep the fleet at sea for prolonged periods of time. Now if we scaled this up to space, a battlestar could be a mobile starbase with the ability to mine the mcguffinite power mineral, manufacture all kinds of machinery, consumables, massive hydroponics for consumables. If the BSG battle groups did long voyages beyond routine resupply, that sort of thing would be completely necessary. And then that would explain how the rag-tag fleet would be kept going. Alternatively, if it seems too much to put all of that inside a ship meant for combat, you could hypothesize a fleet auxiliary ship that does this sort of thing. Maybe one of these megaships was supposed to be at the anchorage but had FTL problems and was stuck out in interstellar space. The Colonials realize it's out there and have to get there with the rag-tag fleet before the Cylons do. And once they save it, then you have the means of convincingly equipping the fleet for long-term survival.

Also, if you had a second wave of colonization heading out from the twelve main colonies, especially if you had FTL ships prospecting surrounding solar systems for the mcguffinite ore and had political dissidents, settlers and adventurers leaving the colonies and setting up shop in remote systems, now you've got more of a rationale for interstellar-capable ships and have some drama as the colonials are trying to get out there with a warning before the cylons, maybe add some more ships to the rag-tag fleet.

[Gil Hamilton]

I don't see why they couldn't just have had all the colonies in different close by systems. If you believe some episodes, nBSG FTL is INCREDIBLY fast. Going by the last episode, our Earth and Kobol are in entirely different galaxies, over a million light years away from each other. There is no reason that the Twelve colonies have to be really that close to each other with that in mind, because "close" could be hundreds of light-years compared to an intergalactic journey completed in a couple years of travel.

[Lonestar]

Me and Shep have discussed this on AIM. Considering modern optics I have no doubt that something like Galactica doesn't have some kind of long range optical array(or maybe not...they needed to send vipers out to visually ID the Pegasus), or that the Colonial Military should have had a "short list" of probable inhabitable planets within a few years travel of the Colonies.

Granted, the "Series Bible" mentioned that the most powerful computer on the Galactica was akin to a Apple II, but still...

Also in the Series Bible, it is flat out stated that most of the technology was lost when the colonists arrived from Kobol, and that this could have been a "recurring theme in Human history"(which implies to me that that part of the series finale was already written).

[Uraniun235]

Going by the last episode, our Earth and Kobol are in entirely different galaxies, over a million light years away from each other.

This is based on some spoken line after Galactica's last jump, isn't it? Because if so, how did the rest of the fleet find where Galactica had jumped to?

[Stofsk]

It also contradicts the season 3 finale which had the pretty cool shot where the camera zoomed out and then zoomed in on earth, which confirmed that earth and the colonials were in the same galaxy.

[Sarevok]

The signpost to Earth that way Nebula thingy was stated to be twelve thousand light years away when they discovered it. They covered the distance in a matter of days IIRC. On the other hand they needed multiple jumps over an entire day to cross a single star system when they found that temple planet. nBSG FTL can be as fast and as slow as the writers want it to be.