Also, five holographic stars for submision-submittetr name synergy.

Toasters aren't covered by the prime directive.

The Prime Directive only applies to pre-warp civilizations. Colonial and Cylon civilizations are both warp-capable.

Oh, and before you all complain, I'm well aware that human-Cylons were not featured in the 70s BSG (another reason why the old show was vastly inferior to the new). I account for this by pointing out that time travel MUST be a factor in this battle, for reasons which should be obvious to fans of both series, but which I won't elaborate on due to spoilers. Evidently, some Cylons from the new series (perhaps surviving renegades from the anti-alliance faction) discovered a way to cross over into the old series dimension and start anew.

THE DEFIANT WAS BUILT TO DESTROY BORG VESSELS AND ITS ABLATIVE ARMOR WOULD

Base stars were one or two missile kills to the original Galactica. The Holy Trinity of fighter pilots was Starbuck, Apollo, and Boomer. When they were all three in the air, the Cylons got curb stomped, but if the plot had one of them stay behind, the rest got screwed somehow.

Humans are stereo visioned predators, dogfighting builds on the strength of the "forward predatory" instincts of homo sapiens.

I can argue this bullshit all day!

Sir, why do we need to know how to use knives in a nuke war?

If you think about it, it would be dependent on the velocity of projectiles.

For example in the Mass Effect universe the weapons shoot projectiles at nearly light speed and radar becomes less useful for avoidance due to the basic laws of physics. So fights are decided by who sees who first and gets off a lethal hit.

In the BSG universe (the new one, not familiar with original) they're pretty much shooting regular bullets (IN SPACE!) and chemically propelled missiles. They move so slowly that at long ranges it would make hitting a moving target impossible. Radar becomes useable for detecting and projecting where enemy fire would hit.

Star Trek is a mixed bag, because it looks like they shoot lasers, but they don't move at light speed, so it would seem like a confined plasma beam of some kind. Plasma would cool off the farther it goes (at our current technology, I believe it's less than a half a foot). So the ships have to be close enough for the beams to have enough energy to do damage when they hit.

(all of that ignores the "because it looks cool on TV you idiot" reality of it)

Screwtape - you ask why BSG incorporates dogfights when dogfighting is obsolete *now* (and presumably, will remain so in the future). I could answer, but I'd be giving away some serious spoilers, so you'll just have to take it on faith for now and watch the series all the way through.

Mothership - ship to ship nukes are notoriously unreliable in the BSG universe, thanks to the efficiency of capital point defense armaments and the skill of the Colonial fighter pilots. The nuke may be the queen of battle, but a Battlestar officer, like any good chess player, knows that she's worthless without first developing the pawns.

It's not really a BSG spoiler, cylons easly hack, disrupt or confuse advanced networked computers, it's explained early in the into pilot miniseries.

Though I still stand by my claim that range of space combat and size of ships used would be dependent on weapon technology.

Small agile fighters for 'conventional' bullet speeds.

Heavily armored battleships for railgun speed projectiles and guided missiles. (Hard to avoid hits but possible to defend with heavy armor and defensive weapons) Also large ship size is needed to power things like multiple railguns.

Stealthy medium cruisers with advanced sensors for relativistic speed warfare. Armor would be of little use for defense. Ship just needs to be big enough to support the power systems for a large enough canon.

And for Star Trek combat, a ship equipped with the most technobabble will win.

Actually, BSG had one weapon they never used and it seemed super effective: Just activate a hyperdrive near a ship's hull. It happened by accident in one episode and tore shit up, which seemed a lot more efficient than using all of those bullets and missiles. Just have a dumb-bomb dropped by a Raptor that had a countdown timer attached to a hyperdrive engine and your Cylon problem vanishes.

You hear that? That was the bristling of a neckbeard...no, more than one neckbeard! We're surrounded!

I didn't watch too far but I remember strike craft launching nukes in the pilot episode then never again, which made the whole idea of strike craft even sillier in a show where capital ships could just teleport on top of each other. The whole point of the things is that they massively outrange any gun or missile a large ship could carry. Battleships wouldn't have gone obsolete if they could just pop up next to carriers.

Blah blah blah fictional answer, but I never saw the strike craft actually do anything useful in the show after the pilot. Say your little fighters wipe out the other side's little fighters. Then what?

If I remember correctly, you could really only jump on top of someone once in a battle, as it took 33 minutes to reset the hyperdrive.

And lest anyone think I read a tech manual or whatever, it was the title and plot of (I think) the second episode, "33." Unless it was a tribute to Rolling Rock Beer, the fleet would jump away to escape the cylons only to have them show up again (over 200 times) right when their engines came back online.

Steam Powered Kleenex, that was the best episode; real tension.