Ship of Lights

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may not meet the notability guideline for fiction. If you are familiar with the subject matter, please expand or rewrite the article to establish its notability. The best way to address this concern is to reference published, third-party sources about the subject. If notability cannot be established, the article is more likely to be considered for redirection, merge or ultimately deletion, per Wikipedia:Guide to deletion.
This article has been tagged since April 2008.

The Ship of Lights is an advanced spacecraft from the original Battlestar Galactica television series, first seen in the episode "War of the Gods". The ship is neither a product of the Colonies, the Cylons, nor the Terrans, (a minor spacefaring human race introduced late in the series who had no connection to the Colonies or Earth).

The Ship of Lights is significantly faster than any known spacecraft, and appears to have the ability to simply show up wherever needed instantly. Its drive system emits an extremely loud sound which somehow travels through the void of space and can be heard by people in nearby spaceships. The sound of this drive system is sufficient to render any human nearby unconscious. The Ship of Lights also carries an unspecified number of smaller craft which appear as balls of light. These smaller craft move so quickly that they can outrun laser blasts fired directly at them. The Ship of Lights itself is quite large, comparable to the size of a Battlestar or Cylon Basestar, though its exact size, crew complement, and capabilities are largely unknown.

The ship is crewed by an apparently humanoid race who are never expressly referred to by name in the series, but who are called "Seraphs" in the scripts for the episodes in which they appear. The Seraphs appear to be noncorporeal sentients, and claim rather ambiguously to have once been more traditionally mortal, but evolved to their present state.

In the episode "War of the Gods", the crew of the ship indicate they are the natural enemies of Count Iblis. Because it is strongly implied that Count Iblis may be the original basis for stories of Satan, this could imply the Ship Of Lights is meant to represent angels. However, this is not stated directly. On the other hand, the episode indicates very strongly that the Ship Of Lights is meant to be "good" and Iblis is meant to be "evil".

In the re-imagined series episode The Ties That Bind, Starbuck paints what appears to be Ships of Light on the ceiling over her bunk. It is also a matter of open debate whether or not some version of the Seraphs are in this series. In several third-season episodes the "Final Five" Cylons have appeared in visions looking reminiscent of the Seraphs.