The red moon: where Starbuck was shot down and flew a Raider home
The red moon is a lifeless, waterless world orbiting a gas giant many jumps from the Twelve Colonies. Weeks after the Fall, Kara Thrace ejected into its frozen carbon dioxide atmosphere, then got off it by gutting the Cylon Raider she had shot down and flying it back into space.
The red moon is a rocky, mountainous world with no discernible life and no water, orbiting a gas giant a considerable number of jumps from the Twelve Colonies. Weeks after the Fall it became the place where Kara Thrace came down, and the place where she worked out how to fly a Cylon.
What is the red moon in Battlestar Galactica?#
It is a bare rock circling a gas giant, far enough from Colonial space to be measured in jumps rather than distance, wrapped in a carbon dioxide and methane atmosphere too cold and too thick to be any use to a human being.
Nothing lives there. There is no water. The hydrocarbon clouds sit over it as an opaque screen, so from above there is very little to see, and the winds in the upper atmosphere are fast enough to be a hazard on the way through. It is the sort of place a pilot ends up rather than goes.
How did Starbuck end up on the surface?#
Her Viper lost control during a skirmish with several Cylon Raiders and fell into the moon's atmosphere, so she ejected and came down under a parachute.
The fight itself was a small one, and the Colonial side of it was mostly nuggets, pilots still in training, thrown against real Raiders weeks after the Colonies had been destroyed. Thrace engaged and won her part of it. Then the moon took her aircraft anyway, and she was on the ground with an oxygen supply she had to ration and no way of knowing whether a rescue would arrive before it ran out.
How did she get off it?#
She found the Raider she had shot down, took the dead biological material out of its interior and flew it back into space.
That is worth sitting with. A Raider is part organism, and getting one airborne meant clearing out the remains of the thing that had been flying it and taking its place. Thrace did that alone, on a frozen moon, with a countdown running on her own air supply.
Sources
- WikiRed moon, Battlestar Wiki entry
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Followed from this entry
Colonial Viper
The Viper was the primary space superiority fighter of the Colonial Fleet, developed on Caprica before the Cylon War and fielded through seven major marks. The Mark II and Mark VII bookended its service from the first war to the Fall of the Twelve Colonies.
Cylon Raider: the living fighter
The modern Raider was a living organism fused to a metal exoskeleton, able to plan and to refuse orders. Killed Raiders resurrected into new ships.
Fall of the Twelve Colonies
A single day of Cylon attack killed more than twenty nine billion people across Colonial space. Barely fifty thousand escaped in a refugee fleet.
Kara Thrace
Kara "Starbuck" Thrace was the finest Viper pilot in the Colonial Fleet, a gifted and self-destructive officer whose attitude often thwarted her own advancement. After her death over a gas giant, a figure bearing her identity returned to guide humanity to its new home.
Twelve Colonies of Kobol
The United Colonies of Kobol, also called the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, was the interplanetary state that represented humanity from the Cylon War until its dissolution upon the settling of the second Earth.
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