Destruction of the Twelve Colonies
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The Destruction of the Twelve Colonies is a fictitious interstellar holocaust first depicted in the 1978 motion picture Battlestar Galactica, which set the stage for the subsequent television series. It is also the main premise for the 2003 miniseries re-imagining, which also spawned a television series.
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[edit] Battlestar Galactica (1978)
[edit] Introduction
After a thousand years of continuous war, the Cylon Alliance surprisingly offers to make peace through their agent, Count Baltar. The leaders of the Twelve Colonies and the Cylons agree to meet on a ship named Star Kobol to discuss the terms. The location of this ship is unknown, but it appears to have been on the edge of Colonial territory. The Colonials send a fleet of 5 Battlestars, Colonial warships that have survived the ongoing Thousand Yahren War, to rendezvous with their arch enemies, the Cylons and to escort the Quorum of the Twelve (the Colonial governing body) to the historic peace conference near the old moon of Cimtar. The Cylons promise to send their Imperious Leader.
[edit] Prelude
The Colonial fleet dispatched to escort the Quorum consisted of the President's Battlestar, Atlantia, and four others, the Galactica, Pacifica, Acropolis, and Triton. Each Battlestar has a complement of 150 Viper fighters. The war with the Cylons had lasted 1,000 yahrens and in that time both sides, human Colonials and Cylons, suffered heavy losses with no end in sight. The surviving Colonial Battlestar warships are under the command of President Adar of the Twelve Colonies, who while on the Colonial flagship, the Battlestar Atlantia, takes several precautions so that the fleet would be as non-aggressive as possible during the peace envoy attempts. No fighter squadrons from any ship are launched and the ships travel under the loosest of precautions. No communications are received from the Cylons while the fleet is in transit. Commander Adama of the Galactica suspects that the Cylons are up to something and informs President Adar of his concerns, but the President states that it was the Cylons who sued for peace through Count Baltar and tries to allay Adama's fears.
Cimtar A Viper probe, led by Captain Apollo and his brother Lieutenant Zac of the Galactica's Blue Squadron, is sent out to patrol the flanks of the fleet. Near the moon Cimtar, a small planetoid inside a dense field of interstellar gas, they find their sensors are being jammed, but they visually spot two Cylon tankers, apparently using the moon as cover. This arouses their suspicions and they continue to investigate further. Deeper in the cloud, they find roughly 1,000 Cylon Raiders, without any Cylon Basestars. They are soon spotted and, with long range communications impossible, Apollo decides they must return to the fleet as quickly as possible to warn it of a pending attack. In a small skirmish with a Cylon patrol pursuing them, Zac's Viper is damaged and he begins to lag behind Apollo with only two of three Viper turbo engines working, but Zac insists that his brother continue the sprint back to the fleet.
Meanwhile, on the Battlestar Galactica, long range sensors begin to detect the patrol is encountering trouble. When Commander Adama informs the President and requests permission to launch fighters, Baltar uses his influence to lull Adar into a false sense of security. Adama had always believed that the peace conference is a Cylon trap and orders all of the Galactica's Viper pilots to go on full alert (which he disguises as a battle stations drill). Adama has his pilots waiting in their fighters in the launch tubes and ready to launch on a moment's notice. Later, when a wall of fighter-craft is detected rapidly approaching the fleet at attack speed, Baltar again fools Adar into thinking it is a welcoming committee and again refuses to allow him to order a scramble. However, all doubt of hostile intent is removed when it becomes obvious that the fighter preceding the wall, Zac's Viper, is being fired upon, and it is destroyed short of the fleet. At this revelation, Baltar immediately disappears, leaving Adar in stunned confusion while Adama, whose ship is the only one ready to fight immediately, orders a general fighter launch.
[edit] The battle
The Cylon fighters descended on the fleet from their left flank. Their primary targets were the launch tubes on the hangar bays and the propulsion systems in the stern. Their attacks were effective, knocking out virtually all of the battlestars' ability to launch a fighter screen. The Galactica was an exception; she managed to launch nearly all of her fighters. During the battle, the remaining Battlestars only succeeded in limited Viper launches. The Galactica recovered 42 Vipers from other battlestars after the battle and added them to her own fighter wing.[citation needed]
[edit] The destruction of the Atlantia
The first target of the Cylon fighter horde was the flagship Atlantia, President Adar's ship and the central command for the fleet. Waves of fighters began a merciless assault, including suicide runs into the hangar bays and direct hits on the bridge. The battlestar succumbed to the constant attacks and exploded in a massive fireball. With the momentous loss of a battlestar, the Colonial fleet was in dire straits.
[edit] The flight of the Galactica
Commander Adama, concerned by the lack of basestars, decided to leave the fleet and retreat to Caprica to mount a defence against possible attacks. He abandoned his fighter screen, which continued to fight Cylon fighters until the last three battlestars in the fleet were destroyed. The Vipers then fought their way to the Colonies only to find the Galactica as the last surviving battlestar.
[edit] Assault on the Colonies
While the Colonial fleet was engaged with the Raider horde, the Imperious Leader attacked the Twelve Colonies with three basestars. The attack began with strafing runs by fighters on planetary defences and civilian targets followed up by assaults by basestars deep in each planet's atmosphere. Cylon centurions disembarked and rounded up surviving humans for extermination. However, the small task force assigned to subjugate the Colonies failed to prevent about 220 civilian ships from escaping unoccupied spaceports.
[edit] Aftermath
With the great majority of humanity destroyed, Commander Adama decided to use the Galactica to protect the small civilian fleet and escort them away. He decided to lead the fleet to Earth, a mythical Thirteenth Tribe of humans lost to history. Unfortunately for the fleet, they were unable to properly fuel in their escape and food supplies were heavily contaminated. So they were forced to set course for Carillon which had a small tylium mine operation past the Nova of Madagon. In a bold move, the fleet followed Captain Apollo's proposal of crossing a heavily mined section of space as a shortcut, which was cleared beforehand by Captain Apollo himself and two of his closest friends, fellow Colonial Warriors Lt. Starbuck and Lt. Boomer. Baltar is brought in chains before the Cylon Imperious Leader. He is enraged that the Cylons went back on the deal they had made with him about sparing his colony from destruction and allowing Baltar to install himself as dictator. The Imperious Leader explains to Baltar that he has missed the entire point of the war. ALL humans must be destroyed. He thanks Baltar for his assistance in wiping out most of the human race and in the feature film, the Imperious Leader has Baltar decapitated on the spot by a centurion. In this same scene in the TV series, the dialogue was changed so that the new Imperious Leader (the Imperious Leader with whom Baltar had originally made the deal was killed at Carillon when the planet exploded, destroying his Basestar) explains that the previous Imperious Leader was programmed at a time when the Cylon Empire was far less tolerant of humans, but now that the Cylon Empire is omnipotent, they can afford to be more generous in their attitude towards humans. He spares Baltar's life and places a Basestar entirely under Baltar's command. Baltar is then instructed by the Imperious Leader to "serve your people" and explain to them the change in Cylon policy dealing with humans. Baltar is then introduced by the Imperious Leader to his second in command, the IL Series Cylon, Lucifer.
That planet's surprisingly abundant fuel, food and recreational facilities turned out to be a trap arranged by the Cylons and their insectoid Ovion allies, from which the refugee fleet barely managed to escape and elude pursuit.
[edit] The Reimagined Series (2003)
During the First Cylon War, the mechanical Cylons and Humans fought to a draw. An armistice was signed and the two sides drew a border between Colonial (Human) space and Cylon space. The Cylons withdrew into their own territory to form their own society, and generally avoided any contact with Humans for the next four decades. At the edge of Human space, an Armistice Station was built to allow Humans and Cylons to meet for diplomatic relations. Each year the Humans sent an officer; the Cylons sent no one -- until 40 years after the war ended, when the Cylons suddenly reappeared at Armistice Station with no warning. But now they no longer resembled machines; instead they looked exactly like ordinary Humans. The Cylons destroyed the Armistice Station, thus beginning their final assault on the Twelve Colonies and Humanity.
After destroying the Armistice Station, the Cylons launched a sneak attack against the entire Colonial fleet. Taking advantage of their immense knowledge of advanced technology, the Cylons exploited a backdoor in the Colonial military's software written into Dr. Gaius Baltar's programs by Cylon Number Six, a Cylon who had become Baltar's lover and who deliberately used him to find weaknesses in the Colonial defense systems he had designed.
Using the knowledge they had gained from the unwitting Baltar, the Cylons were able to override the sophisticated computer systems on each battlestar and viper fighter in the fleet and shut them down, thus rendering the ships defenseless. Within a few hours virtually the entire Colonial fleet had been destroyed. Despite President Adar's "unconditional surrender" of the Twelve Colonies, the Cylons did not respond, and detonated nuclear bombs on each of the planets. Casualties were extreme and within a few hours billions of Humans were dead. Within 24 hours after their initial attack, only the battlestars Galactica and Pegasus had survived; although they would not learn of each other's existence for some time. The Cylons, sometime after, occupied the Twelve Colonies.
[edit] Battle of Ragnar
Following the destruction of Admiral Nagala's flagship, the Battlestar Atlantia, Commander William Adama of the Battlestar Galactica ordered the remnants of the fleet to regroup at Ragnar Anchorage for a counterattack; however, with nearly the entire Colonial military fleet destroyed, it was a civilian convoy lead by newly-sworn-in Colonial President Laura Roslin that responded to the orders. Facing limited options, Commander Adama chose to have the Galactica defend the convoy while each ship jumped into deep space, away from the destroyed colonies. The Galactica managed to hold off two Cylon basestars as ship after ship executed faster-than-light jumps to a safe location. When the civilian ships had jumped, the Galactica then joined them. Nevertheless, only 50,000 Humans - out of 20 billion - had survived the holocaust. Galactica and its fleet of refugees would later find that they were not the sole survivors. At least one other battlestar, the aforementioned Pegasus, had also escaped destruction. Lt. Karl "Helo" Agathon and Lt. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace would also learn that some humans had managed to survive the Cylon attack on Caprica. While this implies that at least some humans left behind by Galactica may have survived the Cylon attack and occupation of the Twelve Colonies, it is unknown if any did.
[edit] Aftermath
After the fight at Ragnar, the fleet jumped past The Red Line and into uncharted space to find a new home. Eventually they discoved a habitable planet they named New Caprica and were able to settle on it for a year before being invaded by the Cylons and captured. The fleet was able to escape but not without thousands of casualties and the loss of Battlestar Pegasus under command of Commander Lee Adama
