The Battle of Jol'Trata?

[Cae Lumis]

So, I recently watched Trekyard's Video on the RDM's Reimagined Battlestar Galactica version of the Battlestar Pegasus, and towards the end of the video they mentioned how the Pegasus of the Original Series was meant to have been distinctive enough from the Galactica that from a glance you could tell the difference. So, out of wanting to relive the nostalgia, I popped in The Living Legend for a rewatch. While I was watching the episode, I was also doing some reading on the Pegasus when I bumped into the following reference:

"...Pegasus took part in the battle of Jol'Trata in which she was badly damaged. After the battle she was found by Battlestar Athenia and towed back to Caprica for repair and re-fitting"

Confused by this reference to a Battle I swore I never heard spoken in the TV Series, I tried to pay close attention to see if I might've missed it. Having failed to hear it in the episode itself, I watched the Deleted Scenes, to similar results. I also tried reading the novel for "The Living Legend", and the novel instead asserts that the Pegasus appeared unique due to its battle scarring. Can anyone tell me where the Battlestar Athenia and The Battle of Jol'Trata came from?

[137th Gebirg]

Gotta say that's the first I've heard of it. The show mentions the Battle of Molokai but I think that's when Pegasus disappeared the first time, which would have been after this other one your mentioning. Honestly never heard of that one, but I do think its provenance suspect, as I don't think there has ever been a Battlestar Athenia mentioned anywhere, and all of them have been fairly well documented - even the apocryphal ones. Too close in name to the character Athena and most writers don't handle similar names well. Case in point was the character of Asha in Game of Thrones books whose name was changed to Yara in the show because the name was too similar to Osha, another secondary character in a completely different subplot.

I found multiple wiki entries that mention this battle you're referring to, but unfortunately none of them cite a source for this information, which is an odd deviation from wiki requirements. Proper citation is mandatory and, since none of this dialog ever appeared in any show, I believe it to Ben further suspect. Perhaps this was a line of dialog in NuBSG that was mentioned in the background and somehow got merged in TOS mythology.

[Cae Lumis]

The fact there's no exact citation on wikipedia, only a vague reference to "The Living Legend", is what concerns me the most. Looking at the revisions history on Wikipedia, I see references to Jol'Trata and Battlestar Athenia going as far back as October 22, 2005, where I found this excerpt:

In the 1978 series, the Battlestar Pegasus was established to be a Columbia-class Battlestar, commissioned at the Vergo fleet yards shortly after the Battlestar Pacifica, Pegasus spent her earlier life patroling the edges of colonial space under her first commander, Abeh. Later in her life the Pegasus took part in the battle of Jol'Trata in which she was badly damaged. After the battle she was found by the Battlestar Athenia and towed back to Caprica for repair and re-fitting.

Yeah, this is all kinds of suspicious to me... just where did all this come from? I mean, as far as I remember, the RDM Pegasus didn't have much in the way of a detailed backstory, just as Helena Cain's Flagship that was in for repairs when the Cylons Attacked, and that was at Scorpia (RDM's counterpart to Scorpion), not Virgon (which oddly enough was referred to here as "Vergo"). This is all kinds of weird.

Just to note: Doing a cursory search for Commander Abeh yielded no results so far, neither did Vergo Fleet Yards.

[137th Gebirg]

Yeah, that all sounds quite specious. The reference to the "Vergo" fleet yards really pushes it into the realm of chronically misspelled Nigerian spam emails to me. "Virgo" is the correct "real world" spelling of the constellation, and the Colonial version was referred to as "Virgon". Who ever wrote that junk up clearly didn't do their homework.

And "Columbia" class is apocryphal as well. There was never any reference to that class name in the 1978 show, nor do I recall it being mentioned in the original script or the novelization. I believe it came up later, during the rise of the internet in the 90's, along with the competing "Nova" class (that one was mine when I drew the first woefully inaccurate schematics of the ship around the same time).

I'd take it all with a very large grain of salt. A shame that fact checking in these Wikis seems to have been jettisoned. I always thought Wikipedia prided itself on crowdsourcing accuracy. I guess those days are long over.

[Cae Lumis]

What I personally suspect happened was that someone posted fanon that originated from God knows where, and being that some of the older information on Galactica can be very hard to come by (especially as resource sites on Classic Galactica form and evaporate quite a bit), people simply took it at face value and opted not to correct the Wiki Article. Perhaps when I'm not so dead exhausted, I'll fix it by removing the information and replace it with information from the BSG Novelization for The Living Legend with its insight that the Pegasus was distinctive by its battle scarring, a feature obviously not visible on the model due to how the episode was filmed.

[137th Gebirg]

The only noticeable difference between the original Galactica and the Pegasus that I could ever see was some extra detailing being added in around the name placard. Looks like someone just penciled in some gridlines to make it look a little more weathered for the Pegasus with some extra greebles and surface details, whereas the stock footage of Galactica remained more "clean".

Update: The gridlines apparently originated in the pilot with the Atlantia and carried over onto the Pegasus.

[Cae Lumis]

Huh, never noticed the extra detailing on the Atlantia and Pegasus till now, thanks for the info! Though it is kinda funny... shouldn't the Galactica be as "battered" (Read: be given a similar amount of detailing to imply weathering) as the Pegasus and Atlantia after the beating she tanked since the Battle of Cimtar? Granted, adding such detail to the Galactica's model followed by reshooting scenes that could be used as stock footage would have been expensive as hell for the series, but still... this is one of those things that just make you wonder about the what-ifs...

[johnnybear]

I recently finished rewatching The Living Legend two parter (one of the best I must say) and decided to see if their was any more information on The Pegasus. On several pages there are references to Jol'Trata and that Glen A.Larson had plans for a feature version of BSG which would feature The Pegasus. I'd be interested to hear more if possible...

JB