Green and Yellow Squadrons - MIA

[Specter]

I find nary a mention of Green or Yellow Squadron after Saga of a Star World. What happened to them? All we ever hear about are Blue and occasionally Red Squadron, plus (an unlikely survival) Silver Spar Squadron in War of the Gods.

Clearly some Viper pilots were killed here and there. Perhaps their numbers were so depleted that those two squadrons were disbanded and their pilots dispersed among other squadrons. And evidently Silver Spar was recreated in some form under the command of Bojay, with Jolly ending up in it.

95% of the time it seems Blue Squadron is doing all the work, but it's still interesting to speculate about the others.

[Cylon-Knight]

Good topic! I never really noticed their existence - and so - their absence.

I'd agree and say Green and Yellow were too few after the Cylon onslaught, and what was left dissolved into Blue and Red. Pilots lost - and or Vipers too damaged to fly, used for parts? Perhaps many didn't get back to the Galactica after the ship left at light-speed for Caprica - and then Earth. Communications were no doubt a mess, if they worked at all, during the mayhem of the attack.

It seems to me, the four squadrons would make sense for a Battlestar. Two per flight bay. One active, three not (rotating shifts for crew rest and equipment maintenance). Depending on alert level, one up to all four squadrons could be launched. Awesome stuff.

[Specter]

Really the only reliable evidence for Green and Yellow Squadrons is the fact that Athena says "We don't have Purple and Orange Squadrons," but she doesn't have the same reaction when Starbuck and Apollo are impersonating Green and Yellow.

There is also the fact that a base star carries four squadrons (as Baltar points out in The Living Legend), so it's reasonable to imagine a battlestar does as well.

[Cylon-Knight]

They state four on a Basestar? Yikes... seems too few. Maybe the Imperious Leader didn't want to give Baltar too much power.
A Basestar has five "landing areas" per disk... and two disks.. I'd figure 10 squadrons, easy.

CRY HAVOC! And let slip the Raiders of war!!

[Specter]

My mistake... it was Lucifer who said 4 squadrons on a base ship.

[Cylon-Knight]

I guess it had to be such... 4 vs 4 (down to a superior - and so equal 2).

10 vs 4 (or 2) would be no match - show over. Back to Star Wars lol

[Specter]

There's evidence in "Fire in Space" that they still had 4 squadrons on the Galactica. Tigh says, "Two squadrons will remain flying at all times on a rotating basis. Red and Blue Squadrons cleared for starboard landing bay." That implies there were 2 more squadrons to launch.

I guess we shouldn't discount the fact that they acquired a brand-new squadron with the trainee class in "Lost Planet of the Gods." Maybe the "temp" Blue Squadron was absorbed into Green or Yellow, and then later Silver Spar became the fourth squadron.

They also had an academy going the whole time. Starbuck and Boomer had a cadet class in "Gun on Ice Planet Zero" with Bow, Shields, and Cree.

[Croft2014]

How many pilots in a squadron?

[Specter]

How many pilots in a squadron?

Difficult question. We know from Seetol’s conversation with the Centurion on Carillon that a battlestar’s full complement of warriors is somewhere over 200. But we also know from Athena’s case that not all warriors are Viper pilots. Without knowing what percentage of warriors are Viper pilots, we can’t even estimate. (We do know that all the pilots they had at one point were able to fit in the life station when they caught the disease.)

[137th Gebirg]

There appear to be 16 launch tubes per bay module on the filming miniature. Assuming there are four squadrons per Battlestar that can launch simultaneously, that makes 8 vipers/pilots per squadron (2 squadrons per bay). Estimate double that for reserve second-string launches, I would say 16 per squadron, tops, for a total of 64 spaceborne warriors (also assuming a full complement upon deployment).

Canonically, speaking, however, only blue and red squadrons were ever present during the course of the series. All the other colors that were mentioned in the clear at the end of SoaSW were clearly a feint successfully fooling the Cylons into thinking a huge task force was coming to knock out the base star. This forced Impy to order it closer down to the surface of Carillon which was about to explode from the Tylium fires down in the Ovion mines.

Had Richard Hatch's continuation effort come to fruition, we would have seen new squadrons established, as their patches were already made and ready to go:


Fun fact 1: The patches for the Battlestar Atlantia were a stacked Galactica blue squadron patch with a ren-fair patch on top of it:


Fun fact 2: The Galactica patches were based on an ancient Indian Sri Yantra Vreemana design:

[Specter]

Great stuff, 137, thanks!

I do think there is enough indirect evidence in Saga to believe Green and Yellow were real squadrons. Nobody bats an eye at the mention of those colors, but both Apollo and Athena are weirded-out when Starbuck mentions Purple and Orange. (And we do know for certain there were more than two squadrons from the time Tigh ordered two full squadrons to keep flying on a rotating basis ... although by that time they had several former wounded from the Pegasus aboard, so that could have been the reconstituted Silver Spar as a third squadron for a total of three.)

[Specter]

Interesting thing I just noticed in "The Hand of God"... Tigh says a base star carries 300 fighters. That would mean each squadron has 75 Raiders.

Now, if the Galactica has 300 Viper pilots, or even close to it, it's hard to imagine that all of them were at Apollo's bachelor party, or that Dr. Salik had enough cryotubes for all of them in the life station. I'm thinking Colonial squadrons must be smaller.

But maybe not much smaller, since the Centurion on Carillon said 200 was "nearly their full complement of warriors." But then again, maybe not all of the warriors were Viper pilots (the Athena conundrum).

[137th Gebirg]

Base stars carry more fighters, likely because they seem to be considerably larger than Battlestars. In Living Legend, when the Pegasus ran right at the one base star, it got in real close and appeared quite small in comparison. Granted, Apogee and Universal Heartland followed in a similar tradition to ILM when it came to onscreen scaling problems, but the base stars definitely appear to have more internal volume overall. Additionally, Cylons wouldn't need living quarters, bathrooms, water storage and other human amenities, so most of the vehicle could serve as a massive launch platform.

Here's a cap from the site gallery:

[Specter]

Here's a further wrinkle. Commander Kronus describes the Fourth Colonial Fleet as "600 fighting ships." Now, that represents the Viper complements of how many battlestars? I always had the impression that there were 5 battlestars in a fleet, both because of the group of five we see at the peace conference and because of Adama's (perhaps apocryphal) narration in the Experiment in Terra telemovie about "one fleet consisting of five flying battlestars." If that's the case, each battlestar would have 120 Vipers, or 4 squadrons of 30. But maybe there were as many as 10 battlestars in a fleet before the destruction of the Colonies.