From: Phillip Atcliffe <Phillip.Atcliffe@u...>
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 12:12:36 -0400
Subject: Battlestar Galactica ships, etc.
A few miscellaneous thought on BSG for FT: You can see my version of the Galactica, a generic Colonial Battlestar (based on the Pegasus) and a Cylon Base Star on Mark Siefert's Unofficial FT web page. My designs are a bit smaller than Steven Guffey's, but are fairly well balanced. They reflect my views on the technology of the Galactica and Cylons -- no shields, a few big weapons, lots of PDAFs and fighters. I had to hold down the number of fighters, though, because there is reason to believe that the Galactica can carry over 150 Vipers, which is a bit much in FT terms, and the Raider complement of a Base Star is said to be 300! One weapons system that the Pegasus had but the Galactica didn't -- or never used on screen -- was missiles. FT missiles are a bit big in terms of mass, so I gave the generic battlestar design a pulse torpedo to simulate clusters of missiles. The Galactica is more optimised for long-range and anti-fighter combat -- I really saw it as having been modified for its new role as a fleet defence ship. Colonial Battlestars would appear to be have a dual capital ship/fighter carrier role, although the Galactica, as the only battlestar with the Fleet, needs to operate more as a carrier in order to survive (attacks on sabotaged Base Stars notwithstanding). Certainly, the few full-scale battles seen in the series show both the Galactica and the Pegasus charging at Base Stars with the intent to engage them in ship-to-ship combat. By contrast, Cylon Base Stars operate more as pure carriers, hanging back and letting their Raiders do the fighting. This seems to be more a matter of doctrine (and, in the case of Baltar, cowardice) than capability since the briefing on the Base Star's armaments given in the episode "The Hand of God" mentions two "megapulsars" plus numerous laser turrets. The Ravishol Pulsar from "The Gun on Ice Planet Zero" can be neatly simulated by a Nova Cannon, with the modification that it can only hit a single target and the "beam" will disappear once it has hit its target. You might want to shrink the templates somewhat, too, to simulate the fact that the Pulsar puts out a narrow beam rather than a ball of energy -- I incline towards using a slowly-spreading fan, say, 5 degrees of arc wide. The Destruction of the Colonial Battlefleet scenario should, IMO, be rather different to Steven's version. For a start, there were only 5 battlestars there, and no Base Stars took part -- just lots and lots of Cylon fighters. The Base Stars were off destroying the Colonies... Re miniatures: Comet Miniatures do metal models (2-3" long) of the Galactica, Viper and Raider -- not in scale with each other. The Galactica miniature, unfortunately, looks to be based on the Monogram model kit, one of the _worst_ travesties of an SF model ever inflicted on the public. The Viper and Raider models are large enough to be used as squadrons, with a die or chit standing for the number of fighters remaining. Rumour hath it that Monogram may be going to re-issue its BSG models sometime in the future, in which case the battlestar and Base Star kits could be used with Comet's fighter miniatures.