Battlestar Solaria: the networked warship lost in the opening hours of the Fall

Solaria was a Colonial battlestar fitted with integrated command and control and Gaius Baltar's Command Navigation Program. It was reported destroyed alongside Columbia and Triton during the Cylon attack, and William Adama named it to his crew in his account of what had happened.

By Tom GPublished 9 Sept 2026

Solaria was a battlestar of the Colonial Fleet carrying integrated command and control systems and Dr Gaius Baltar's Command Navigation Program. It was reported lost during the Fall of the Twelve Colonies, along with Columbia and Triton, and Commander William Adama named all three when he told his crew what had happened.

TL;DR

Solaria belonged to the modern half of the Colonial Fleet. It had integrated command and control and ran the CNP, the networked navigation software Baltar had written and the Cylons had quietly rewritten, and both of those facts are the whole explanation for what happened to it. The ship was reported lost during the opening Cylon attack on the Colonies, in the same report that carried the losses of Columbia and Triton, and Adama mentioned its destruction directly in the update he gave his crew aboard Galactica. Nothing about a fight is recorded, because there was not much of one. The same source page notes the fate of the battlestar Uned, which lost power immediately before contact, and Anastasia Dualla described that report to Felix Gaeta as sounding like someone had turned off a switch.

What happened to the battlestar Solaria?#

Solaria was reported destroyed in the Cylon attack on the Twelve Colonies, in the same casualty report that listed Columbia and Triton, and Adama passed the news to his own crew as part of his account of the attack.

The listing matters more than the absence of detail. Triton belonged to Battlestar Group 39 and carried the same integrated command and control and the same CNP. Columbia was the second battlestar of its name, the first having been lost at Operation Raptor Talon. Solaria sat in that company, and the three of them went in one line of a report.

Why did a modern battlestar fall so fast?#

Every feature that made Solaria current made it reachable, because the Cylons had obtained the Command Navigation Program and altered it so that they could open a ship's firewalls and shut it down at will.

The pattern repeated across the Fleet. Admiral Nagala lost Atlantia over Virgon to the same backdoors, and his death is what put Adama in command of what remained. The battlestar Uned went down in the first waves the same way. Dualla read Gaeta the report on it: one battlestar lost power just before it made contact with the enemy, and it was like someone just turned off a switch.

The ships that lived were the ones nobody had finished modernising. Pegasus was sitting through a scheduled overhaul with its networks switched off, and that, rather than anything its crew did, is why it was still there afterwards.