In a way, the Cylons showing up at the last second was a (admittedly dark) blessing for the people in charge of the fleet. It proved them right, if they'd waited any longer, they'd ALL have died. Small comfort, but better than dwelling on the posibility that they jumped away and it might have turned out they COULD have evac'd the sublights.
This was one of the most emotional scenes in the mini series. The agony in all their faces knowing what they're doing and can do nothing about it. Hard decisions.
The arrival of the Cylon fleet in the last seconds of the clip is there to confirm that the decision to leave sublight vessels behind was the right call. Unfortunately, in real life, such a confirmation is rarely provided, and people who make hard choices can always feel doubt resting on their shoulders.
@@olegshevchenko5869 exactly, I wish they hadn't shown the attack at the end. Would have made this even more impactful because of the 'what ifs'. I wonder if the network added that in to make it more palatable? They did a similar thing in 33, where the Olympic Carrier was 'empty' before they destroyed it. In the original version, they could see people inside banging on the windows, but the network had them cut it. In both cases, a much more debatable scenario became more clear cut at the end
@@olegshevchenko5869 I love the change you see in Apollo's face when he realizes that. He says "welp, I was right. They were fucked. Sorry guys" with just his expression
@@GBart It was a look of helplessness. He desperately wanted to do his job as a Colonial Pilot and defend them but knew his mission, as crappy as it is, was to save those he could.
@@olegshevchenko5869It is gut-wrenching in that way though - Capt. Apollo orders the other ships not be informed of their destination for fear of their capture. However, at the end it’s indicated the Cylons had no interest in capturing humans (by virtue of their immediate use of nuclear weapons). Thus, it seems like Apollo made the wrong call - but we can’t know that for sure. So, I still find there is some ambiguity to it that is gut-wrenching.
Watching that little girl play with her toy, not knowing that she would soon get vaporized was so heart wrenching. Especially as a dad, I was like nooo
@@SapphireZeev36 oh yes....LBJs shameless slur of Barry Goldwater as a nuclear warmonger....somebody should have asked the Vietnamese what they thought about this...
I feel that this was really the scene where fans knew that the remake wasn’t frakking around, and that this show would be gritty and tragic to the ‘t’.
In any other show another hero (maybe Pegasus or Atlantia) would have arrived to save the sublights, not this one though. This really set the stakes of the show, and showed exactly why Galactica was required for humanity’s survival. Asides from Pegasus reinforcing the fleet there was never really much relief for Galactica’s crew.
Yup when Galactica was running low on Viper Pilots and other crew members they had to rely on the volunteers within the Civilian Fleet to replace their loses.
Cain ordered the civilian ships that she found to be stripped of their FTL drives. She only took the people she could use and had their families murdered in front of them.
@@Crackshotsteph losing 1000 viper pilots was bettrer than losing 10000 civilians,they had no time to launch raptors for evacuation of sublight fleet,the attack happened within minutes
After years and years of watching SF television before this, every instinct I had told me that the little girl would be rescued *somehow* because that's just what they do on SF television ... but she wasn't and she died. Dramatically hard and dramatically honest. That was the moment I was sold on BSG.
I realized at 2:44 it was apollo who did the FTL jump, my theory is that the copilot at the back was supposed to do it because you can see he was very distressed from this but he couldn't bring himself to do it so Apollo did it in his place.
Definitely one of the best scenes in the mini-series. I love the circling shot as everyone’s advising the president, really drives home the immediacy and reality of the situation. And the radio chatter + escalating eerie music as the Cylons appear contrasted with the clinical efficiency of their guided missiles … and of course the little girl, blissfully ignorant of her fate. Lords of Kobol protect their souls indeed.
Its not easy seeing the big picture when you're one of the unlucky ones being left behind to die so the majority can live. Its only human to feel abandoned and betrayed.
I think the show copped out a bit by vindicating Apollo’s call. It would have been much more ballsy if the show never revealed what happened after jumping.
Sometimes the most difficult choices lie in who gets saved.............and who doesn't. I couldn't imagine the pain Laura had to keep with her after her aide told her the little girl she met that her ship didn't have FTL capability. To me, knowing the Cylons had advanced FTL should have prompted the Colonials to "refit" as many ships to FTL as possible. I know many ships probably aren't powerful enough or designed in a way that FTL may not have been practical for all ships, but as many as possible. Another idea is some kind of an "FTL teather" would have allowed a non FTL ship to "hitch a ride" with an FTL vessel. But at the end of it, Laura made the right decision. There was NO time to try to save them and NO Cylon was going to grant them any mercy. So the only mercy was allowing them a painless death. And that's what the little girl and thousands of others met.
A retrofit with FTL systems maybe possible but there are size limitations to be observed and the botanical Cruiser, the ship on which the little Girl is located, is beyond the restrictions and by design to unstable the idea to tether ships together to make a joint jump is a good one only on paper, as the distorting forces emitted by the primary ship would tear a grouping of free floating but tethered vessels apart. we see the effects of one such super close proximity jump when "BAD BOOMER" abducts Hera and jumps the raptor less the 50 meters from Galactica's Hull
Its also an issue of actually making the FTL systems. I imagine they can't necessarily be salvaged from destroyed ships without some serious gear which is highly unlikely given that the cylons basically nuked anywhere that could build or support that kind of process
@@hammer1349 Perhaps, but didn't the Pegasus have the level of foundry technology to build these devices? And it's clear the Cylons had FTL in all levels of their ships. Now that might have been a limitation the Cylons overcame due to their biotechnology. Galactic for a time did have a Cylon Raider that Starbuck managed to jump back to Caprica with. So I would have been surprised the Colonials didn't have the ability to reverse engineer the technology to at least a basic understanding ,since they had similar if less advanced tech. Or perhaps they simply felt that science did not trump the natural urge to simply survive? In the old series, we did see clear evidence of technological advancement despite them fleeing from the Cylons. They invented an invisibility cloak, time travel, the C.O.R.A AI, and the flying motorcycle. (Yes I'm laughing). But BSG is an abject lesson in what NOT always to do when your civilization is in ruins. You don't stop advancing ,and one did attempt it and that was Galen Tyrol. He created the "Stealth Viper" which did have FTL and could not be picked up. A fleet of these ships could have turned the war in the Colonial's favor and led to better ship FTL development. But then again, Galen was a Cylon.
@@deathstrike I think the Pegasus was MIA at this point in time though I welcome being corrected. Another thing to consider is raw materials. Most mining facilities would have been destroyed or otherwise taken over by the cylons. The colonial fleet doesn't have any supply lines to anywhere stable and any industrial ships capable of doing those kind of resource collections tasks are also a liability if the enemy finds them, most of this ships lost in this scene were probably civilian shuttle style or short range haulers, furthering the supply problem. As pointed out, most of those ships wouldn't have been designed to take an FTL drive or withstand the jump forces, even Galactica almost snapped in half on her last jump as she had her flight pods extended. Overall, I'd argue its just not practical
@@deathstrike for the Cylon FTL ranges, it is established on screen (as official canon) that the computational capacity ( by this I mean the accuracy) is the most crucial factor. there is one or more episodes in which a flight of raptors is able to jump back to Caprica from the location of the Fleet in I believe 10 jumps, where it would take most colonial vessels at least 20, this is due to the fact that those raptors have been retrofitted with Cylon FTL computation cores.
The moment they got access to the Colonial computer networks , it was game over. The ability to shutdown the oposing force is just beyond. After that , its only a matter of moping up the stranglers. Its ironic actually. Galactica survived because she was build at a time when people feared hacking. The new ships kind of forgot about it. They thout that putting a few firewalls will protect them against AI.... Even without the backdoors the cylons put in Baltar's program , they still could do a lot of electronic damage - remember the episode where Galactica was forced to network its computers. They had to pruge everything just to recover her after.
this is a good analogy of sci/fi writing, we had good times up until the late 2000's and then it just went away And now we're left with the fallout, if we're "lucky"
No one's talking about the flight engineer behind Lee and the Colonial One pilot. You can actually see the poor guy's composure erode from stoic professionalism to sheer distress as the voices of betrayal and anger from the sublight ships pile up.
The 12 colonies can build faster than light space ships, scorpio shipyard to station an entire galactic fleet, and do instant blood test to tell human vs cylons. Yet they still haven't figured out what to do with cancer? Someone must be really bad with tech trees.
They're technically a post apocalyptic civilisation (after Kobol), so it makes sense that their most advanced tech is what they managed to escape with which is their spaceship tech.
This was the only time I had hard feelings towards Billy. There was literally NO REASON for him to bring up the little girl to the President when she was already stuck with a hard decision. Did he think they should risk annihilation because of one little girl?
I liked it. It served to remind/reinforce Roslin (and the viewer) that while it though the decision to leave the ships behind was a numbers game, the numbers were still people.
@@elevencastle6154 I think Roslin thanked him, because she knew Billy wasn't actually *trying* to stab her in the heart with it. Or at least, he wasn't acting from malice, or vindictiveness.
I thought his reluctance made him more human (if naive). Billy was really still an innocent here. However foolish, the idea that they should risk a little time to save children must have had a powerful draw on him. With hindsight, seeing the full scene, we know Apollo and Roslin were right. But what if they left, and the followup Cylon attack were never directly shown to us? And we're just left to wonder, did they show up within minutes? Or did it take an hour? Two?
I am glad to see an example of a "Lifeboat ethics" crisis in fiction. There are often times when trying to save everyone , will lead to everyone dying, because "there is only so much room on the lifeboat" In those times, horrifically hard decisions must be made, if anyone is to be saved at all
This likely happened off-screen. The novelisation indicates not a lot of ships made it off the surface and those that did were just the lucky ones. 220 (22,000 in the novels) out of how many hundreds if not thousands of ships likely escaped the Cylons.
Just a cold scene. You sacrifice a few to save the many. Ron Moore knew/knows how to make a tough & haunting decision a total gut wrencher on TV. The whole series was an exercise in morality and ethics in decision making. What a species will do just to survive.
this was the show at its finest: dealing with moral conundrums in a survivalist society. It all got a bit off track in S4 but overall still a masterpiece of a show.
I love the vibes the miniseries gave off of pure uncertainty and terror since all the characters we follow have no concrete idea of what they’re up against which builds so much tension compared to later which is still good but the whole vibe is a lot more certain since we know the cylon’s full capabilities by then
Great dialogue and framing of a complex decision. I'm a bureaucrat, and in many ways while more complex, decisionmaking in government agencies resembles this. Lee and Colonial One's pilot are the bureaucrats, they will get the job done, but they need direction on what exactly to do. Lee could have jumped the FTL ships to Ragnar 5 minutes ago, but he doesn't have the authority to do it, so he needs the direction. Roslin's questioning was fair and to the point, and accordingly, she is the politician/leader. In many asking for decisions moments I have been in, the weighing of options and potential ramifications Doral, the pilot, and Lee had would have been handled behind the scenes, before presenting it to the leader(so it looks like the bureacracy has a clear plan either way and is a united front), but a las its a combat zone and hes a cylon sleeper anyway. I love Mary Mcdonnell's acting in BSG for how she balances things in this moment. One of the things women I feel deal with that men don't in terms of power, is that a womans femininity is perceived as weak. Some women compensate by giving off a more masculine persona. Mcconnell/Roslin didn't, her mannerisms, her voice, were still feminine, but she grew a pair of beachball sized lady nuts, and did what needed to be done. Thats why Adama and Lee respected her.
Should've been transferring everyone and everything possible off the sublight ships from the moment they showed up. Even without a guaranteed threat, still the smartest thing to do. Kinda surprised Lee didn't think of this earlier. I also get it was done for effect but I would've shut the damn radio off.
you mean the radio communication between Caprica Gov. and Laura Roslin aboard the vessel still designated as Colonial Heavy 798 at that time just before the automated protocol to keep the civilian Government in operation, "Case Orange" is initiated ?
@@HrLBolle I think so? It's just a radio transmission otherwise. I just think the scenes depicting the ever shrinking pool of information sources are the most interesting.
"Order the fleet to jump to Ragnar. Galactica will stay behind to evacuate as many as possible before the cylons arrive, at which point she will rendezvous with the fleet at Ragnar"
An effective sequence, for sure, but there’s no reason Colonial One couldn’t have told the sub-light ships to scatter right away. Some distance is better than none.
Yeah, they didn't exactly decide how many ships exactly or what designs were to stay in the fleet after the Miniseries. Every sublight ship design ended up in fleet shots from season 1 onwards anyway, blowing out the numbers when they added new ship designs for no reason.
If you need an explanation, Adama did transmit an order for all colonial units to rendezvous at Ragnar for regroup and counter attack. I don’t think it would be too far fetched for some civilian ships to jump there independently of Rosalin’s fleet.
@@jamesxiaolong2199 yeah but the thing is all the ships that survived Ragnar jumped away while galactica was protecting them and I don’t believe this ship was seen jumping away. If I’m wrong correct me pls
@@cmj0929 keep in mind not every ship was seen making the jump either, Cloud Nine didn’t even show up for half the season and she was present too. Besides until the basestars arrived above Ragnar the Colonials would have had a refuge to hide at.
Funny that both Lee and writers forgot about this tidbit during Lee's speech on Baltar's trail... and it was VERY poor choice that writers validated decision by letting them know that decision was right. Again, from start to finish, writers failed to really capitalize on tone of the show. Like at the very ending, there should be one last clash in protest and part of hard deal with cyclons that people either abandon tech, go with Cylons but not continue alone. One last grimdark decision.
Lee not mentioning this during the trial is part of a weird trend i noticed in the rest of the TV series that the miniseries isn't exactly ignored, but there seemed to be a real reluctance to directly reference its events. like there's a scene where Lee asks Baltar to tell him about just one selfless thing he's done in his whole life, Lee will even give him the benefit of the doubt and believe whatever he says with no evidence. my first thought in that scene was the moment where Baltar has the chance to steal the old woman's position on the Raptor when Boomer and Agathon are doing the lottery, but in a fit of (probably guilt-fuelled) uncharacteristic kindness, he doesn't follow through on it. always weirded me out that Baltar doesn't say anything, and from that Lee concludes that he has no examples of selflessness to point to. wonder if it's to do with the writers losing their nerve on a lot of the hard calls; part of the fun of the miniseries is that it writes a lot of absolutely huge checks, but the show then fails to cash them properly, and the writers didn't want to call attention to that.
Budgetary reasons. Thats like asking why don't airliners have afterburner engines. Literally it would be the same thing, if you had a fleet of airplanes of propeller planes, jets, and supersonic jets, and only the supersonic could go, you'd do the exact same thing they are doing.
Doesn't make sense in this setting if even raptors can jump. At the time they made the miniseries all the colonies were still in one system. It makes less sense because the sublight ships wouldn't conceivably be of much use beyond a single planet and moons. Conceivably you might have bulk carriers where it's worth the delay to wait years for them to move between planets but it's a hard argument to make when FTL is so common. I would wager the biggest impetus to have STL ships was to setup the very dilema of this scene.
@@gregorymuir1985 They were likely only used for interplanetary travel during the time of the 12 colonies and didn't need a FTL drive. No-one had predicted this would happen.
@@Ozymandias1 That's still some pretty slow-going. Since there were no destinations currently in use beyond the 12 colonies, why have FTL then? You can justify having the jumps even in a single star cluster because those are some big distances to travel conventionally. So if you can justify FTL in something like Colonial One, I find difficulty understanding the use case for any of the STL ships or why they could not be retrofitted with FTL.
This is the sort of decision our leaders, east and west, could have faced during the Cold War. Multiple megadeath writeoffs on our own side, or risk losing everything. Thank God cooler heads prevailed, and weapons inventories are a tiny fraction of what they once were.
This should be how the new reboot continues on..... Imagine the left over sub lighters finding earth.... our earth now, and we create Cylons to defend ourselves..... From the original 12 colony survivors..... Now that would be a long term twist.
A lot of ships probably aren’t meant for anything further than in system travel, in bsg the 12 colonies are based around 4 solar systems in close proximity so it’s likely that a lot of ships don’t have one due to not being designed for travel beyond their native solar systems. Think of it like a civilian airliner vs a jet with afterburners capable of supersonic speeds. One isn’t able to make use of afterburners cause it isn’t necessary
@@jfernandez7098 but eve our own solar system is too fast for practical non-FTL flight. It takes 9 minutes for light to travel from sun to earth and 4 hrs to travel to Neptune
@@shepherdlavellen3301 but a lot of ships are self sufficient with onboard equipment for producing food plus there could absolutely be countless stations like Ragnar meant for civilians as checkpoints along the way to planets if they don’t have ftl, plenty of them like the botanical ship could absolutely be designed for longer voyages as they have sufficient crew comforts for such a journey. All we know for certain is that some ships don’t have ftl so there’s got to be a reason like maybe ftl technology is very expensive, maybe more so than every other component of the ship combined
The Miniseries implied that the Twelve Colonies were all in the same system orbiting the same star within easy distance of one another and that FTL drives weren't often used, implying that some planets shared orbits or several of the Colonials actually inhabited moons to each other. It wasn't until S3 and S4 when they revealed that it was a four-star system so such things like sublight only ships beyond fighters and shuttles were an improbable. It was an abandoned concept that never carried onto the main series since all these sublight ships ended up as part of fleet background shots anyway.
The depicted distances aren’t that far. At the end of the season 3 finale the show leaves us with the Humans and Cylons facing each other for battle in the Ionian Nebula, and then the camera zooms out to reveal the galaxy, rotates, zooms in on almost the exact same spot, and reveals Earth, but it still took another year for the show to end. However when characters talk they discuss traveling “Millions” of Light-Years. According to a BSG Wiki the 12 colonies exist within a pair of binary star systems which are 0.16 Light Years apart (About 59 Light Days). So Humanity would have little reason to travel much further than that on a regular basis. The systems are around 2,000 Light-Years away from Kobol, which the fleet finds at the end of season 1. So most likely the fleet doesn’t travel more than about 8-10,000 Light-Years during the course of the show.
When the miniseries was made the setting was one solar system with a dozen habitable planets either revolving around its sun or gas giants, but during season two they formalised the setting as being 4 suns that are rotating around each other and a single point between them.
Galactica is close to a Mile long there should be room for thousands of people!? A aircraft Carrier is 1/4 the size and has 5000 crew members too. I thought the inside of Galactica was way to small. But maybe shows budget was low. And thus few small rooms
The thing is, they might have had time to rescue at least some of the civilians on the non-FTL ships if they had started immediately upon finding them, but they were operating under the assumption they had more time.
@allenharper2928, there was no time. They would have to fit all those civilian take time and galactica was already in ragnor re arming the cylon were already everywhere.
Not likely, Galactica didn’t have any ammunition for her Flak batteries, all her presence would have accomplished is giving the ship several nuclear hits. One hit cost them nearly a hundred people, that many missiles could have very well destroyed the ship. Without Galactica the survivors in the fleet would be doomed to either die by Cylons or stripped by the Pegasus.
@jamesxiaolong2199 not to mention that throughout most of the miniseries Adama and the officers wanted to get into the Frey on what you might call the active front. Their plan was to re-arm at Ragnar and use whatever adventage had kept them from being up so far to do try to wrestle control of the system from the cylons. They were like we are soldiers we are meant to fight for our home. When Laura's fleet arrived in the Anchorage she barely talked Tigh/The Military into giving them disaster aid packs. And only because Lee called Tigh's BS they had nothing to spare by pointing out since they intended to fight they would not need some of Galacticas Disaster relief pods. Please let us have two. I am military I know you have them. It was only after Laura yelled at William that the war was lost and they had to tuck runs. That Adamas do or die spirit started to fade and only when a Billy a civilian cozying up to dee in the CiC that the civilians became humanized infront of the military became more than. Just a burden. But their mission to protect
Avoided lol. The cylon had already hacked the colonial fleet with the virus, and only galactica got saved since it was an older battlestar. The colonies were doomed already.
Doral, a cylon is advocating for saving as many humans as possible? It doesn't seem that RDM knew he was going to be a cylon in the mini-series...hmmm..
Another example of Laura Roslin's poor leadership. If you look closely you see at least three Vipers in the scene. Put up a defense at least. also, why would they be any civilian ships without FTL drive in a multi-system? Oh wait because it was supposed to be a single system. But then why could not the Cylons just scan the entire system? Lee just said the Cylons would jump in and nukes them. Then he said they might be captured. Both can not be truth at the same time. God, I hate Lee Adama.
😂 how is this poor leadership more ship would still attack. There is no choice but to leave those sunlight ships. Doesn't matter who is in charge wend the enemy is out to exterminate you.
@@JohnG44 First, you are right when the Cylons find the sublight ships, but everything before that is wrong. Second, again, there are at least three or maybe four Vipers with the civilian vessels. Third, if you have watched the miniseries, this is the second attack. But it was done for shock value, nothing more, nothing less. So once again, you are wrong overall.
@@JohnG44 They did have a chance, I think they was only 5 raiders, and even if the Cylon did send more raiders it would buy time for the sublight ships to get a least a little bit away. So, you are wrong, period. Nothing more and nothing less. We see in the series that outnumber Vipers can defeat larger number of Raiders. Since the Viper is superior to the Raider or maybe the pilots are superior to the Raider AI. So, again you are wrong.
@ak102986 viper were outnumber how they gonna gold back wend all the re Raiders lunch their missile at the fleet the colonial hand not fought in years raider were superior roslin did right who knows how many would follow. Thinking the enemy giving you time lol they were following
The stupid part of this is.... they could have just moved the ships without jumping.... Just move it enough where it wouldn't be a bomb risk and the cylons wouldn't know their exact location. Jump the f--- out when you spot them.
Unfortunately the Colonies never learned from the first war, always equip all ships with FTL Drives military is a given but civilian as well just incase for combat readiness.
Probably was too expensive for most civilian ships, which these were. Just like today, civilian ships assume a military vessel will always be nearby to save the day.
In a way, the Cylons showing up at the last second was a (admittedly dark) blessing for the people in charge of the fleet. It proved them right, if they'd waited any longer, they'd ALL have died. Small comfort, but better than dwelling on the posibility that they jumped away and it might have turned out they COULD have evac'd the sublights.
I think the Cylons turning up takes away from the scene, them “not knowing” could’ve been used later on.
This was one of the most emotional scenes in the mini series. The agony in all their faces knowing what they're doing and can do nothing about it. Hard decisions.
The arrival of the Cylon fleet in the last seconds of the clip is there to confirm that the decision to leave sublight vessels behind was the right call. Unfortunately, in real life, such a confirmation is rarely provided, and people who make hard choices can always feel doubt resting on their shoulders.
@@olegshevchenko5869 exactly, I wish they hadn't shown the attack at the end. Would have made this even more impactful because of the 'what ifs'.
I wonder if the network added that in to make it more palatable? They did a similar thing in 33, where the Olympic Carrier was 'empty' before they destroyed it. In the original version, they could see people inside banging on the windows, but the network had them cut it. In both cases, a much more debatable scenario became more clear cut at the end
@@olegshevchenko5869 I love the change you see in Apollo's face when he realizes that. He says "welp, I was right. They were fucked. Sorry guys" with just his expression
@@GBart It was a look of helplessness. He desperately wanted to do his job as a Colonial Pilot and defend them but knew his mission, as crappy as it is, was to save those he could.
@@olegshevchenko5869It is gut-wrenching in that way though - Capt. Apollo orders the other ships not be informed of their destination for fear of their capture. However, at the end it’s indicated the Cylons had no interest in capturing humans (by virtue of their immediate use of nuclear weapons). Thus, it seems like Apollo made the wrong call - but we can’t know that for sure. So, I still find there is some ambiguity to it that is gut-wrenching.
This is the scene to show people who are interested in BSG. This sets the tone of the entire series. Dark, brutal with a glimmer of hope.
Watching that little girl play with her toy, not knowing that she would soon get vaporized was so heart wrenching. Especially as a dad, I was like nooo
It was apparently a nod to an old nuclear war commercial during the Cold War.
@@SapphireZeev36 oh yes....LBJs shameless slur of Barry Goldwater as a nuclear warmonger....somebody should have asked the Vietnamese what they thought about this...
As a kindness they left the girl to play.
@@sethkimmel7312 LBJ did not start the war it was North Vietnam that started the war all LBJ did was try help the South Vietnam
The way this show started was perfect. That is a rare thing in sci-fi.
Battlestar Galactica set a new standard for good SciFi. It was actually a drama written into a SciFi setting and that was intentional.
I feel that this was really the scene where fans knew that the remake wasn’t frakking around, and that this show would be gritty and tragic to the ‘t’.
In any other show another hero (maybe Pegasus or Atlantia) would have arrived to save the sublights, not this one though. This really set the stakes of the show, and showed exactly why Galactica was required for humanity’s survival. Asides from Pegasus reinforcing the fleet there was never really much relief for Galactica’s crew.
Yup when Galactica was running low on Viper Pilots and other crew members they had to rely on the volunteers within the Civilian Fleet to replace their loses.
Cain ordered the civilian ships that she found to be stripped of their FTL drives. She only took the people she could use and had their families murdered in front of them.
@@Ozymandias1 I know that. I was saying that in another nobody would have been lost here because someone else would save these poor folks,
@@Crackshotsteph losing 1000 viper pilots was bettrer than losing 10000 civilians,they had no time to launch raptors for evacuation of sublight fleet,the attack happened within minutes
@@brummyuk2151 I wasn't trying to imply Atlantia was active, I was saying other shows don't have the guts to abandon then kill off refugees.
Lee is a good advisor, hard and direct, no bs.
Its easy to advocate sacrifice of others. Less so for oneself. Still they had no time to procrastinate.
And then he sat and listen to their pleas. That’s rough
And this is the same Lee that had to fire on the Olympic Carrier. Poor guy couldn’t catch a break..
The atmosphere of this scene is why the pilot is some of the best TV ever produced
Watching this scene for the first time on tv,I knew this show was going to be a classic!
After years and years of watching SF television before this, every instinct I had told me that the little girl would be rescued *somehow* because that's just what they do on SF television ... but she wasn't and she died. Dramatically hard and dramatically honest. That was the moment I was sold on BSG.
I realized at 2:44 it was apollo who did the FTL jump, my theory is that the copilot at the back was supposed to do it because you can see he was very distressed from this but he couldn't bring himself to do it so Apollo did it in his place.
Here's another one he knew the coordinates to Ragnar and was their for lead for transmitting it to the other ftl capable ships.
@@ricoender8020I concur.
Definitely one of the best scenes in the mini-series. I love the circling shot as everyone’s advising the president, really drives home the immediacy and reality of the situation.
And the radio chatter + escalating eerie music as the Cylons appear contrasted with the clinical efficiency of their guided missiles … and of course the little girl, blissfully ignorant of her fate.
Lords of Kobol protect their souls indeed.
"I hope you people rot in hell for this!"
Damn...
They made the right call though, they really had no choice.
This show is an anxiety feast
Its not easy seeing the big picture when you're one of the unlucky ones being left behind to die so the majority can live. Its only human to feel abandoned and betrayed.
I think the show copped out a bit by vindicating Apollo’s call. It would have been much more ballsy if the show never revealed what happened after jumping.
@@ericp1139 that's a good point
Sometimes the most difficult choices lie in who gets saved.............and who doesn't.
I couldn't imagine the pain Laura had to keep with her after her aide told her the little girl she met that her ship didn't have FTL capability. To me, knowing the Cylons had advanced FTL should have prompted the Colonials to "refit" as many ships to FTL as possible. I know many ships probably aren't powerful enough or designed in a way that FTL may not have been practical for all ships, but as many as possible. Another idea is some kind of an "FTL teather" would have allowed a non FTL ship to "hitch a ride" with an FTL vessel.
But at the end of it, Laura made the right decision. There was NO time to try to save them and NO Cylon was going to grant them any mercy. So the only mercy was allowing them a painless death. And that's what the little girl and thousands of others met.
A retrofit with FTL systems maybe possible but there are size limitations to be observed and the botanical Cruiser, the ship on which the little Girl is located, is beyond the restrictions and by design to unstable
the idea to tether ships together to make a joint jump is a good one only on paper, as the distorting forces emitted by the primary ship would tear a grouping of free floating but tethered vessels apart.
we see the effects of one such super close proximity jump when "BAD BOOMER" abducts Hera and jumps the raptor less the 50 meters from Galactica's Hull
Its also an issue of actually making the FTL systems. I imagine they can't necessarily be salvaged from destroyed ships without some serious gear which is highly unlikely given that the cylons basically nuked anywhere that could build or support that kind of process
@@hammer1349 Perhaps, but didn't the Pegasus have the level of foundry technology to build these devices? And it's clear the Cylons had FTL in all levels of their ships. Now that might have been a limitation the Cylons overcame due to their biotechnology. Galactic for a time did have a Cylon Raider that Starbuck managed to jump back to Caprica with. So I would have been surprised the Colonials didn't have the ability to reverse engineer the technology to at least a basic understanding ,since they had similar if less advanced tech. Or perhaps they simply felt that science did not trump the natural urge to simply survive?
In the old series, we did see clear evidence of technological advancement despite them fleeing from the Cylons. They invented an invisibility cloak, time travel, the C.O.R.A AI, and the flying motorcycle. (Yes I'm laughing). But BSG is an abject lesson in what NOT always to do when your civilization is in ruins. You don't stop advancing ,and one did attempt it and that was Galen Tyrol. He created the "Stealth Viper" which did have FTL and could not be picked up. A fleet of these ships could have turned the war in the Colonial's favor and led to better ship FTL development. But then again, Galen was a Cylon.
@@deathstrike I think the Pegasus was MIA at this point in time though I welcome being corrected. Another thing to consider is raw materials. Most mining facilities would have been destroyed or otherwise taken over by the cylons. The colonial fleet doesn't have any supply lines to anywhere stable and any industrial ships capable of doing those kind of resource collections tasks are also a liability if the enemy finds them, most of this ships lost in this scene were probably civilian shuttle style or short range haulers, furthering the supply problem. As pointed out, most of those ships wouldn't have been designed to take an FTL drive or withstand the jump forces, even Galactica almost snapped in half on her last jump as she had her flight pods extended. Overall, I'd argue its just not practical
@@deathstrike for the Cylon FTL ranges, it is established on screen (as official canon) that the computational capacity ( by this I mean the accuracy) is the most crucial factor.
there is one or more episodes in which a flight of raptors is able to jump back to Caprica from the location of the Fleet in I believe 10 jumps, where it would take most colonial vessels at least 20, this is due to the fact that those raptors have been retrofitted with Cylon FTL computation cores.
I couldn't believe how right Adama was. How fast and efficiently the cylons striked was jaw dropping.
The moment they got access to the Colonial computer networks , it was game over. The ability to shutdown the oposing force is just beyond. After that , its only a matter of moping up the stranglers. Its ironic actually. Galactica survived because she was build at a time when people feared hacking. The new ships kind of forgot about it. They thout that putting a few firewalls will protect them against AI.... Even without the backdoors the cylons put in Baltar's program , they still could do a lot of electronic damage - remember the episode where Galactica was forced to network its computers. They had to pruge everything just to recover her after.
Moral dilemma, the concept to a great story!
this is a good analogy of sci/fi writing, we had good times up until the late 2000's
and then it just went away
And now we're left with the fallout, if we're "lucky"
No one's talking about the flight engineer behind Lee and the Colonial One pilot. You can actually see the poor guy's composure erode from stoic professionalism to sheer distress as the voices of betrayal and anger from the sublight ships pile up.
Man, this show still holds up after 20 years.
That had to be the most fucked up necessary decision that had to be made. Holy shit.
The 12 colonies can build faster than light space ships, scorpio shipyard to station an entire galactic fleet, and do instant blood test to tell human vs cylons. Yet they still haven't figured out what to do with cancer? Someone must be really bad with tech trees.
Like in Civilization 6, when we gets 21st century tech but missing 17th century tech
They're technically a post apocalyptic civilisation (after Kobol), so it makes sense that their most advanced tech is what they managed to escape with which is their spaceship tech.
Cancer is large range of diseases that behave quite differently. There’s a reason treatment is so difficult.
Welcome to the reality of the Human Body.
We Canae cheat death.
Commander Adama wears glasses, too. No corrective surgery even though we have the technology to build sentient AI.
This was the only time I had hard feelings towards Billy. There was literally NO REASON for him to bring up the little girl to the President when she was already stuck with a hard decision. Did he think they should risk annihilation because of one little girl?
I liked it. It served to remind/reinforce Roslin (and the viewer) that while it though the decision to leave the ships behind was a numbers game, the numbers were still people.
Her response of “thank you” to being stabbed in the heart by that information really shows a lot about her character.
@@elevencastle6154 I think Roslin thanked him, because she knew Billy wasn't actually *trying* to stab her in the heart with it. Or at least, he wasn't acting from malice, or vindictiveness.
I thought his reluctance made him more human (if naive). Billy was really still an innocent here. However foolish, the idea that they should risk a little time to save children must have had a powerful draw on him. With hindsight, seeing the full scene, we know Apollo and Roslin were right. But what if they left, and the followup Cylon attack were never directly shown to us? And we're just left to wonder, did they show up within minutes? Or did it take an hour? Two?
He did it because the screenwriters wanted the audience to know she would be left behind. That’s pretty much why that line is in there.
after all this time its still heart retching to watch.
02:40: "This is Colonel Lionel Pendergast of the Earth vessel Prometheus. Passengers, please take your seats and standby to jump."
I am glad to see an example of a "Lifeboat ethics" crisis in fiction.
There are often times when trying to save everyone , will lead to everyone dying, because "there is only so much room on the lifeboat"
In those times, horrifically hard decisions must be made, if anyone is to be saved at all
The darkness of this episode made this show great.
An older, more seasoned adviser would have withheld that info at 2:20. She did not want to know that.
It would've left her pondering. It was a "better now than later" in a morbid way :(
@@ShannonCarter55 She would have found out eventually. After all, they had a database of everyone in the fleet to search for people they knew.
“The hardest choices require the strongest wills”- Thanos
Raiders were somehow a far more effective exterminating force at the outset, at least much more generous with the missiles
This is what TOS was missing. The horror.
This likely happened off-screen. The novelisation indicates not a lot of ships made it off the surface and those that did were just the lucky ones. 220 (22,000 in the novels) out of how many hundreds if not thousands of ships likely escaped the Cylons.
Forgot how brutal the mini-series was.
Oh man. I havent seen the mini-series since it first aired. Totally forgot about this scene.
Can you imagine if Billy stayed and became one of the Final Five lmao
Just a cold scene. You sacrifice a few to save the many. Ron Moore knew/knows how to make a tough & haunting decision a total gut wrencher on TV. The whole series was an exercise in morality and ethics in decision making. What a species will do just to survive.
Dang. I would have made the decision to transfer as many civilians to FTL ships... and got us all killed. I wouldn't make a good president.
My friend, the fact you acknowledged that tells me that if you were in that position you would have made the right decision regardless.
@@allenharper2928 One can only hope.
They were discussing moving people off the sublights only a scene prior. They were likely about to send out the shuttles when the Cylons found them.
Sometimes, the right choice is the terrible one. Because the other is a worse one in disguise.
this was the show at its finest: dealing with moral conundrums in a survivalist society. It all got a bit off track in S4 but overall still a masterpiece of a show.
2:28 - dude, why would you bother telling her that? She didn't need to know
It goes to show that sometimes the right decision, isn’t the easiest one.
You can't always save everyone...
One of the most gut wrenching scenes in sci fi..and what made BSG so good.
Ok that was too good for a franchise I’ve barely heard about
you should give it whirl
I love the vibes the miniseries gave off of pure uncertainty and terror since all the characters we follow have no concrete idea of what they’re up against which builds so much tension compared to later which is still good but the whole vibe is a lot more certain since we know the cylon’s full capabilities by then
Fun fact
If the cockpit of Colonial One looks familiar, it should.
It's the cockpit of a Space Shuttle simulator which was in England.
one of the biggest long term issues is losing that botanical ship immediately caused so many problems
and was still the best option.
@@mbpaintballa I don't disagree it was the only choice they could make at the time.
They had another botanical ship in the fleet.
Great dialogue and framing of a complex decision. I'm a bureaucrat, and in many ways while more complex, decisionmaking in government agencies resembles this. Lee and Colonial One's pilot are the bureaucrats, they will get the job done, but they need direction on what exactly to do. Lee could have jumped the FTL ships to Ragnar 5 minutes ago, but he doesn't have the authority to do it, so he needs the direction. Roslin's questioning was fair and to the point, and accordingly, she is the politician/leader. In many asking for decisions moments I have been in, the weighing of options and potential ramifications Doral, the pilot, and Lee had would have been handled behind the scenes, before presenting it to the leader(so it looks like the bureacracy has a clear plan either way and is a united front), but a las its a combat zone and hes a cylon sleeper anyway. I love Mary Mcdonnell's acting in BSG for how she balances things in this moment. One of the things women I feel deal with that men don't in terms of power, is that a womans femininity is perceived as weak. Some women compensate by giving off a more masculine persona. Mcconnell/Roslin didn't, her mannerisms, her voice, were still feminine, but she grew a pair of beachball sized lady nuts, and did what needed to be done. Thats why Adama and Lee respected her.
Should've been transferring everyone and everything possible off the sublight ships from the moment they showed up. Even without a guaranteed threat, still the smartest thing to do. Kinda surprised Lee didn't think of this earlier.
I also get it was done for effect but I would've shut the damn radio off.
A fucking awesome series. One of the best.
At 4:15 what does the woman say? I hope you people... ?
“I hope you people rot in hell for this!”
"I hope you people rot in the hell for this" that's what I've heard
I hope you people rot in hell for this.
She said "I hope you people rot in hell for this"
Please upload the scene where the Colonials offer their complete and unconditional surrender but the Cylons don't give a f***.
you mean the radio communication between Caprica Gov. and Laura Roslin aboard the vessel still designated as Colonial Heavy 798 at that time just before the automated protocol to keep the civilian Government in operation, "Case Orange" is initiated ?
@@HrLBolle I think so?
It's just a radio transmission otherwise.
I just think the scenes depicting the ever shrinking pool of information sources are the most interesting.
"Order the fleet to jump to Ragnar. Galactica will stay behind to evacuate as many as possible before the cylons arrive, at which point she will rendezvous with the fleet at Ragnar"
This part of the show really hurt.
Historically choices like this are made.
4:15 just imagine how Lee had to recite all these things At Baltars trial.
An effective sequence, for sure, but there’s no reason Colonial One couldn’t have told the sub-light ships to scatter right away. Some distance is better than none.
Th bad side of getting all the ships together like that was that the sublight ships were all neatly together for the cylons to take out at once.
It would have been a ballsier choice for the show if they jumped and we never find out what happened to the ships left behind.
Only one tylium refinery ship protected at all costs.
It’s actually funny because there’s a ship exactly like the one the little girl is on in the fleet going forward
Probably the one the little girl is on doesn't have an FTL system.
Yeah, they didn't exactly decide how many ships exactly or what designs were to stay in the fleet after the Miniseries. Every sublight ship design ended up in fleet shots from season 1 onwards anyway, blowing out the numbers when they added new ship designs for no reason.
If you need an explanation, Adama did transmit an order for all colonial units to rendezvous at Ragnar for regroup and counter attack. I don’t think it would be too far fetched for some civilian ships to jump there independently of Rosalin’s fleet.
@@jamesxiaolong2199 yeah but the thing is all the ships that survived Ragnar jumped away while galactica was protecting them and I don’t believe this ship was seen jumping away. If I’m wrong correct me pls
@@cmj0929 keep in mind not every ship was seen making the jump either, Cloud Nine didn’t even show up for half the season and she was present too. Besides until the basestars arrived above Ragnar the Colonials would have had a refuge to hide at.
Billy was brutal with unnecessary facts LOL
Funny that both Lee and writers forgot about this tidbit during Lee's speech on Baltar's trail... and it was VERY poor choice that writers validated decision by letting them know that decision was right. Again, from start to finish, writers failed to really capitalize on tone of the show. Like at the very ending, there should be one last clash in protest and part of hard deal with cyclons that people either abandon tech, go with Cylons but not continue alone. One last grimdark decision.
Lee not mentioning this during the trial is part of a weird trend i noticed in the rest of the TV series that the miniseries isn't exactly ignored, but there seemed to be a real reluctance to directly reference its events. like there's a scene where Lee asks Baltar to tell him about just one selfless thing he's done in his whole life, Lee will even give him the benefit of the doubt and believe whatever he says with no evidence. my first thought in that scene was the moment where Baltar has the chance to steal the old woman's position on the Raptor when Boomer and Agathon are doing the lottery, but in a fit of (probably guilt-fuelled) uncharacteristic kindness, he doesn't follow through on it. always weirded me out that Baltar doesn't say anything, and from that Lee concludes that he has no examples of selflessness to point to. wonder if it's to do with the writers losing their nerve on a lot of the hard calls; part of the fun of the miniseries is that it writes a lot of absolutely huge checks, but the show then fails to cash them properly, and the writers didn't want to call attention to that.
No chicken pie for you!
Cat dying was a tear jerker
Dee got over his death real fast for Apollo
they're at war--suck it up, do you duty and mourn when there's time.
What´s the point of building a spaceship, that can´t do FTL jump, if you have the technology to do it?
Budgetary reasons. Thats like asking why don't airliners have afterburner engines. Literally it would be the same thing, if you had a fleet of airplanes of propeller planes, jets, and supersonic jets, and only the supersonic could go, you'd do the exact same thing they are doing.
Doesn't make sense in this setting if even raptors can jump. At the time they made the miniseries all the colonies were still in one system. It makes less sense because the sublight ships wouldn't conceivably be of much use beyond a single planet and moons. Conceivably you might have bulk carriers where it's worth the delay to wait years for them to move between planets but it's a hard argument to make when FTL is so common.
I would wager the biggest impetus to have STL ships was to setup the very dilema of this scene.
@@gregorymuir1985 They were likely only used for interplanetary travel during the time of the 12 colonies and didn't need a FTL drive. No-one had predicted this would happen.
They don’t need them often. Plus it would be cheaper in many cases.
@@Ozymandias1 That's still some pretty slow-going. Since there were no destinations currently in use beyond the 12 colonies, why have FTL then? You can justify having the jumps even in a single star cluster because those are some big distances to travel conventionally. So if you can justify FTL in something like Colonial One, I find difficulty understanding the use case for any of the STL ships or why they could not be retrofitted with FTL.
Ripley would have went and rescued her😢
This is the sort of decision our leaders, east and west, could have faced during the Cold War. Multiple megadeath writeoffs on our own side, or risk losing everything. Thank God cooler heads prevailed, and weapons inventories are a tiny fraction of what they once were.
Sherman was right..."war is hell..."
Sherman was wrong, in hell innocence is spared.
@@jamesxiaolong2199 Sherman never said that, by the way.
This should be how the new reboot continues on..... Imagine the left over sub lighters finding earth.... our earth now, and we create Cylons to defend ourselves..... From the original 12 colony survivors..... Now that would be a long term twist.
I don't understand, logistically speaking shouldn't all ships be FTL capable due to the distance between planets and star systems?
A lot of ships probably aren’t meant for anything further than in system travel, in bsg the 12 colonies are based around 4 solar systems in close proximity so it’s likely that a lot of ships don’t have one due to not being designed for travel beyond their native solar systems. Think of it like a civilian airliner vs a jet with afterburners capable of supersonic speeds. One isn’t able to make use of afterburners cause it isn’t necessary
@@jfernandez7098 but eve our own solar system is too fast for practical non-FTL flight. It takes 9 minutes for light to travel from sun to earth and 4 hrs to travel to Neptune
@@shepherdlavellen3301 but a lot of ships are self sufficient with onboard equipment for producing food plus there could absolutely be countless stations like Ragnar meant for civilians as checkpoints along the way to planets if they don’t have ftl, plenty of them like the botanical ship could absolutely be designed for longer voyages as they have sufficient crew comforts for such a journey. All we know for certain is that some ships don’t have ftl so there’s got to be a reason like maybe ftl technology is very expensive, maybe more so than every other component of the ship combined
The Miniseries implied that the Twelve Colonies were all in the same system orbiting the same star within easy distance of one another and that FTL drives weren't often used, implying that some planets shared orbits or several of the Colonials actually inhabited moons to each other. It wasn't until S3 and S4 when they revealed that it was a four-star system so such things like sublight only ships beyond fighters and shuttles were an improbable. It was an abandoned concept that never carried onto the main series since all these sublight ships ended up as part of fleet background shots anyway.
Perhaps if all the sub-lights were from Caprica's system...
Heck for the cylons that’s just lazy, launching a single nuke for each unarmed ship
What kind of distances were involved in this show? Were they basically just hopping around the same system for awhile?
The depicted distances aren’t that far. At the end of the season 3 finale the show leaves us with the Humans and Cylons facing each other for battle in the Ionian Nebula, and then the camera zooms out to reveal the galaxy, rotates, zooms in on almost the exact same spot, and reveals Earth, but it still took another year for the show to end.
However when characters talk they discuss traveling “Millions” of Light-Years.
According to a BSG Wiki the 12 colonies exist within a pair of binary star systems which are 0.16 Light Years apart (About 59 Light Days). So Humanity would have little reason to travel much further than that on a regular basis. The systems are around 2,000 Light-Years away from Kobol, which the fleet finds at the end of season 1. So most likely the fleet doesn’t travel more than about 8-10,000 Light-Years during the course of the show.
When the miniseries was made the setting was one solar system with a dozen habitable planets either revolving around its sun or gas giants, but during season two they formalised the setting as being 4 suns that are rotating around each other and a single point between them.
Tragic
They should’ve immediately excavated all of the people on the sunlight ships to the FTL ones- but I guess that’s hindsight 🤷♂️
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 'good' guys....the race that definitely deserved to survive the cylon onslaught.
Galactica is close to a Mile long there should be room for thousands of people!? A aircraft Carrier is 1/4 the size and has 5000 crew members too. I thought the inside of Galactica was way to small. But maybe shows budget was low. And thus few small rooms
The thing is, they might have had time to rescue at least some of the civilians on the non-FTL ships if they had started immediately upon finding them, but they were operating under the assumption they had more time.
@allenharper2928, there was no time. They would have to fit all those civilian take time and galactica was already in ragnor re arming the cylon were already everywhere.
All this could of been avoided if the Galactica had jumped to check on the ambassador
Not likely, Galactica didn’t have any ammunition for her Flak batteries, all her presence would have accomplished is giving the ship several nuclear hits. One hit cost them nearly a hundred people, that many missiles could have very well destroyed the ship. Without Galactica the survivors in the fleet would be doomed to either die by Cylons or stripped by the Pegasus.
@jamesxiaolong2199 not to mention that throughout most of the miniseries Adama and the officers wanted to get into the Frey on what you might call the active front. Their plan was to re-arm at Ragnar and use whatever adventage had kept them from being up so far to do try to wrestle control of the system from the cylons. They were like we are soldiers we are meant to fight for our home. When Laura's fleet arrived in the Anchorage she barely talked Tigh/The Military into giving them disaster aid packs. And only because Lee called Tigh's BS they had nothing to spare by pointing out since they intended to fight they would not need some of Galacticas Disaster relief pods. Please let us have two. I am military I know you have them. It was only after Laura yelled at William that the war was lost and they had to tuck runs. That Adamas do or die spirit started to fade and only when a Billy a civilian cozying up to dee in the CiC that the civilians became humanized infront of the military became more than. Just a burden. But their mission to protect
That he changed mind and officially they became the fugitive fleet and left the colonies for good
Avoided lol. The cylon had already hacked the colonial fleet with the virus, and only galactica got saved since it was an older battlestar. The colonies were doomed already.
Doral, a cylon is advocating for saving as many humans as possible? It doesn't seem that RDM knew he was going to be a cylon in the mini-series...hmmm..
Could just be a red herring, lord knows this show is filled to the brim with em
he's advocating staying in one place for long enough for the raiders to show up and nuke every single one of them
If this was Star Trek they would do some warp bubble nonsense instead of doing some actual drama
Another example of Laura Roslin's poor leadership. If you look closely you see at least three Vipers in the scene. Put up a defense at least. also, why would they be any civilian ships without FTL drive in a multi-system? Oh wait because it was supposed to be a single system. But then why could not the Cylons just scan the entire system?
Lee just said the Cylons would jump in and nukes them. Then he said they might be captured. Both can not be truth at the same time. God, I hate Lee Adama.
😂 how is this poor leadership more ship would still attack. There is no choice but to leave those sunlight ships. Doesn't matter who is in charge wend the enemy is out to exterminate you.
@@JohnG44 First, you are right when the Cylons find the sublight ships, but everything before that is wrong. Second, again, there are at least three or maybe four Vipers with the civilian vessels. Third, if you have watched the miniseries, this is the second attack. But it was done for shock value, nothing more, nothing less. So once again, you are wrong overall.
@ak102986 3 vipers vs. 6 raider, they had no chance and the cylon would send more still there was no time.
@@JohnG44 They did have a chance, I think they was only 5 raiders, and even if the Cylon did send more raiders it would buy time for the sublight ships to get a least a little bit away. So, you are wrong, period. Nothing more and nothing less. We see in the series that outnumber Vipers can defeat larger number of Raiders. Since the Viper is superior to the Raider or maybe the pilots are superior to the Raider AI. So, again you are wrong.
@ak102986 viper were outnumber how they gonna gold back wend all the re
Raiders lunch their missile at the fleet the colonial hand not fought in years raider were superior roslin did right who knows how many would follow. Thinking the enemy giving you time lol they were following
The stupid part of this is.... they could have just moved the ships without jumping.... Just move it enough where it wouldn't be a bomb risk and the cylons wouldn't know their exact location. Jump the f--- out when you spot them.
Cylons have tracking on their missiles, moving would have only burned fuel.
Now think of Ukraine.
Unfortunately the Colonies never learned from the first war, always equip all ships with FTL Drives military is a given but civilian as well just incase for combat readiness.
Probably was too expensive for most civilian ships, which these were. Just like today, civilian ships assume a military vessel will always be nearby to save the day.