Unanswered Questions, Wild Theories and Strange Observations for/about/on BSG.

[The Grumpy Celt]

Discovering that the leading characters on the Galactica were all Cylons...

Fairly early on in the first season several people I knew who watched the show believed ALL the characters were Cylon. They thought that the Cylons had won this was centuries ago and they just kept repeating themselves - namely the war - over and over.

I still say the five remaining models are only individual units, rather than numbering in the thousands.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Unfortunately for the Geek in everyone in us, the answer is (and will probably always be): as far as the writers need it to.

The good thing for us: We will rarely see them contradict something they said previously, or make the whole plot technically absurd...

Yep. Right now we know that the colonial Jump drives have a lower range than the Cylons. OTOH, there's no jump signature or anything to indicate that something's jumped in or out, and there are apparently no other traces for tracking purposes. At least, Gaeta never yelled out "Jump spikes at (coordinates)!" When a ship is detected, it's usually by Dradis, and sometimes by emissions ("I'm picking up...Colonial signals?"). (This leads to a thought...the Cylons may be finding the Colonials by their active Dradis emissions...)

Thus, the Cylons have to send out their raiders to do a search sweep of EVERYTHING within known Colonial jump range. This takes a while, which is why the Colonials are still alive. Especially if the Colonials are clever enough to jump somewhere into the interstellar void (though they don't seem to...either because they can't, or the writers want to show us the ships for cutscenes, which, logically, you wouldn't really be able to see them in between stars).

Brad

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Yep. Right now we know that the colonial Jump drives have a lower range than the Cylons. OTOH, there's no jump signature or anything to indicate that something's jumped in or out, and there are apparently no other traces for tracking purposes. At least, Gaeta never yelled out "Jump spikes at (coordinates)!" When a ship is detected, it's usually by Dradis, and sometimes by emissions ("I'm picking up...Colonial signals?"). (This leads to a thought...the Cylons may be finding the Colonials by their active Dradis emissions...)

Thus, the Cylons have to send out their raiders to do a search sweep of EVERYTHING within known Colonial jump range. This takes a while, which is why the Colonials are still alive. Especially if the Colonials are clever enough to jump somewhere into the interstellar void (though they don't seem to...either because they can't, or the writers want to show us the ships for cutscenes, which, logically, you wouldn't really be able to see them in between stars).

Brad

The Dradis certainly helps picking them up. So, if they stay at a particular place for n hours, if the Cylons jump within n light hours of them, they will pick up their continuous Dradis signal. Still means they have to cover a lot of space, but at least they don't have to rely on their own Dradis signal to be reflected from Colonial ship hulls. I guess the Wireless communication traffic will do the same, by the way.

The Colonials don't jump into the interstellar void as they probably also constantly scouting for resources - food, water, tylium, metals, ore, whatever might prove useful in the future. (That was also the way Pegasus found them. Pegasus discovered that the Cylons were jumping always to systems with possible resources, though they tried to predict the Cylon movement and surprise them. They found Galactica instead of the Cylons - the real reason the Cylons were using this jump pattern was that they were following Galactica...)