Olympic Carrier

The Olympic Carrier was a civilian passenger liner, officially an Intersun Passenger Cruiser, that escaped the Fall of the Twelve Colonies as part of the refugee fleet led by Galactica. It became the first great moral crisis of the exodus when, after vanishing and reappearing under suspicious circumstances, it was destroyed by Colonial Vipers on the order of President Laura Roslin and Commander William Adama over fears it carried a Cylon nuclear weapon. The ship was lost roughly five days after the fleet fled the Cyrannus Star System. (Battlestar Galactica, "33")

Service and the exodus#

When the Cylons launched their surprise attack on the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, civilian ships caught in space were left to fend for themselves. With the Colonial Fleet crippled by sabotage to its computer networks, the civilian vessels were left defenseless. Assuming the presidency, Laura Roslin ordered all surviving ships, the Olympic Carrier among them, to gather at a designated rendezvous point. (Battlestar Galactica (miniseries))

When Cylon Raiders discovered the rendezvous, every faster-than-light capable ship abandoned it for the gas giant Ragnar, where Commander Adama of Galactica was arming the remaining fleet for a counterattack. There Roslin persuaded Adama to abandon the Colonies and search for a new home. The Olympic Carrier departed with the ragtag fleet that formed under Galactica's protection. (Battlestar Galactica (miniseries))

The thirty-three minute crisis#

Over the following five days, Cylon forces tracked the fleet's location and jumped near its position every thirty-three minutes, forcing constant exhausting jumps. After one such jump the Olympic Carrier was unaccounted for and presumed lost. Its disappearance coincided exactly with the failure of the Cylons to appear on schedule, breaking the thirty-three minute cycle for the first time. (Battlestar Galactica, "33")

The ship then suddenly reappeared near the fleet. Despite positive identification, Roslin and Adama grew suspicious, and the Raptor and two Vipers flying combat air patrol went to intercept it. A voice over wireless explained that the Olympic Carrier had suffered an FTL fault that took three hours to repair, and that the Cylons had inexplicably ignored and left them alone. (Battlestar Galactica, "33")

Destruction#

When ordered to hold its distance, the Olympic Carrier instead broke formation and headed toward the fleet, and further instructions were met with silence. Thirty-three minutes after the liner rejoined the fleet, the Cylons appeared once more. When a radiological alarm indicated nuclear weapons aboard the Olympic Carrier, the Vipers were ordered to destroy it before it could close on the fleet. After some reluctance, the pilots complied and the ship was destroyed. (Battlestar Galactica, "33")

Nobody knew for certain whether the Cylons had taken the passengers and crew off the ship or left them aboard to die. Among those aboard was said to be Dr. Amarak, a former Ministry of Defense scientist whose message to President Roslin, sent just before the liner vanished, warned of a traitor in the fleet. Gaius Baltar, fearing exposure, had urged Roslin to cut off contact with the ship. Roslin kept the ship's name on a slip of paper in her desk as a reminder, and Adama later recalled that more than a thousand people had died aboard. The destruction of the Olympic Carrier ended the cycle of attacks, but it left Roslin to question whether she had condemned innocent survivors. The whole crisis is the plot of the episode "33", the first of the regular series. (Battlestar Galactica, "33", "Water", "Pegasus")