Issue #1: "It's Not Just an Adventure, It's a Job"

Kent Thrace - One issue that arose early on with spot-welding both of the Battlestar Galactica versions together was that the characters from the original all had mononyms—"Starbuck" was Starbuck's entire name in the '70s series, not a callsign. This was relatively easily rectified by just making up "proper" names for them, but still, it was a thing that had to be kept in mind during the design phase.

little golden rectangles - Colonial money, as it appeared in the original series. In hindsight, I wonder if the appearance of gold-pressed latinum in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was a reference to that. (When this story first came out, some people who were not familiar with the original Galactica assumed this was meant to be GPL. And, who knows, in UF they may be the same thing.)

Easy Eight - In the real world, this was the nickname for the M4A3E8 sub-version of the Sherman medium tank of World War II fame. "Easy" was the U.S. Army's phonetic code for the letter "E" at the time (today it's "Echo").

47 Orioni - There's a slight Latin error here; the genitive of "Orion" is "Orionis". 47 Orionis, also known as Omega Orionis, is a B-type main sequence star of approximately seven solar masses, much hotter than the Sun, and so presumably its habitable zone is significantly farther away. It's also a variable-magnitude star and in the blue range, so daylight conditions on New Kobol are probably... interesting... from an Earthborn perspective.

Major Denis Antilles - The name of the UF version of this character is a combination of his canonical one from Star Wars and that of the actor who played him, Denis Lawson. His Colonial callsign, "Wedge", comes from the fact that he was the first Colonial Warrior to transition from the WDF; as a WDF pilot, his flight-school-bestowed callsign was "Lesser", so you can imagine he was perfectly fine with getting a new one in the Colonial Forces.

all-night pyramid sessions - Pyramid is a gambling card game popular in Colonial space. Compare poker, sabacc, pazaak, etc.

Reebo Kadi-Das - I was mildly surprised that no one noticed that Reebo's name is a combination of two shoe manufacturers. Or maybe everyone did and nobody wanted to dignify it by mentioning it out loud. :)

Tono and Jek Porkins - Jolly from OG BSG being the father of Porkins from Star Wars was probably the most amusing spontaneous crosslink that happened while designing this bit, even if "Porkins" is one of the earliest examples of George Lucas's unmatched ability to come up with deeply dumb character names.

AKA, inevitably, Duelist - She was almost "Evil Twin", but no one in the Colonial Forces knows Miki, so it wouldn't have made sense.

Issue #2: "Graduation Day"

Kirs Rovel - This character's appearance is loosely based on someone I worked with at the newspaper where I was employed when I wrote this, which is a bit silly, since this isn't a comic book and no one but me would ever be able to tell.

a bit like Neimoidian battle droids - That is, the first ones they encountered were Centurions from the old show, while these are the type from the newer one.

"You're not a Cylon." "No, no I am not." - This is true! Boomer is not a Cylon.

I figured we'd let Newton's Third Law handle that - "To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts."

Kirs Rovel's callsign... Redback - A particularly dangerous sort of Australian spider in real life; here, probably the name of some similarly lethal animal native to New Kobol.

"I wouldn't be much of a demolitionist if I couldn't blow up a fuel dump." - I'm not sure where the idea to make Porkins the demo guy came from, but it still amuses me, so I guess it was a good one.

she bore the marks of extensive rebuilding - When Galactica first reached Zeta Cygni, she was configured as she was in the 1970s show, but has since been refitted into something much more along the lines of the more recent series. Compare the Enterprise refit between TOS and The Motion Picture.

Issue #3: "Moral Imperative"

You're Death Star Tarkin, aren't you? - General Wilhuff Tarkin is a very different sort here than he was in Star Wars, perhaps because, although GENOM's Military Arm was arguably an even sterner environment than the Imperial Navy in which to develop one's Weltanschauung, it did still operate within the overall cultural envelope of the Federation, not the Empire.

He's called "Death Star", by the way, for the part he played in an operation against the "loyalist" remnant of GENOM in the post-Crossroads corporate civil war, which we envisioned at around the time we wrote UF4 but never got around to writing. It involved the prototype AT&T, which was significantly smaller than the one employed against Zeta Cygni, but still had quite an inconveniently large gun.

Major Guld "Groundloop" Bowman - A ground loop is an aviation mishap in which an aircraft moving on the ground experiences a sudden loss of first roll, and then yaw, control. One wing lifts, the other drops, the wingtip on the low side hits the ground, and the plane pivots violently around the contact point. This is bad for a number of things, including the wing tips, the landing gear, and, if the incident is sufficiently violent, potentially the whole airframe and everything else in the vicinity.

Most pilots receive their callsigns in training, usually awarded by their colleagues, which explains why they are often uncomplimentary. For all that he's a maximum hardass to his trainees, his callsign suggests that Guld's own record of airmanship is not unblemished...

he's the guy we made a Veritech instructor in the hopes of saving at least one of the SF-8Z prototypes - ... as does this remark.

Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club - Formally the Rancho Oro Verde Fly-In Ranch, Pancho's was a dude ranch and restaurant near Edwards Air Force Base that was something of a hangout for the test pilots of the immediate postwar era, and prominently featured in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. It closed in 1953 when the restaurant burned down, after which the Air Force seized the property by eminent domain (which it had been trying to do since the previous year).

The Riding Club's proprietor, Florence "Pancho" Barnes, was one of the Original Characters of the golden age of aviation, having barnstormed in the '20s and founded a stunt pilots' union in Hollywood in the '30s. Before learning to fly, she'd gotten the nickname "Pancho" while participating in the Mexican Revolution of the 19-teens disguised as a man. No shit. She died in 1975, and it is anyone's guess how she came to be running a new version of the Riding Club on Muroc III in the 25th century. (If it's the same one. Which it could be. Who knows?)

recommend you try SCE to AUX - You have to respect the classics in this business.

Issue #4: "Codename SERAPH BLUE"

he killed time playing Thexder - "That man is playing Thexder. Thought we wouldn't notice; but we did."

only a dry creek bed - I got this visual from an episode of Dogfights in which a Korean War jet fighter pilot did something similar.

he's in ground effect - The ground effect is an aerodynamic phenomenon wherein a moving airfoil near a fixed surface (i.e., the ground) creates a high-pressure area underneath it—in effect, an air "cushion"—that increases lift and reduces drag relative to the wing's performance in clear air. This can make takeoffs easier, and landings harder, than expected, and under the right conditions, it can be exploited for purposes like this, as well.

There is a whole class of aircraft, known rather clumsily in English as "wing-in-ground-effect vehicles" and somewhat more elegantly in Russian as ekranoplan, which are designed to operate only within the ground-effect envelope. They can't fly very high at all, but are fast and efficient over regular enough surfaces.

you are making me some serious ka-ching today - I have a great and abiding love for this entire sequence.

Sharon, you gotta warn me - Particularly this bit.

BATTLESTAR AURORA SDF-100 - All Colonial battlestars have "SDF" hull numbers, after Galactica was designated SDF-25 in honor of her Zetan refit.

I'm going to ask Tyrol to make you my crew chief - I'm also particularly fond of this little bit, for whatever reason. Kozue and Cally doing that whole officer pilot-enlisted tech buddy thing.

"Fuckhead, use the radio." - The "WDF hand signals" joke originated in a game of Phoenix Command, an '80s/'90s RPG probably best described as an extremely elaborate combat system in search of a game, that was played at WPI in the early '90s. The person playing the squad leader kept trying to do military hand signals by way of RP, and "you fuckhead, we have radios" was the reply.

Issue #5: "Crucible"

the best laid schemes o' mice an' men - Robert Burns, "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785".

Richard Daystrom's multitronic principle - This incident from the WDF's past is adapted from the Star Trek episode, "The Ultimate Computer", in which the eponymous rogue computer was in control of the Enterprise rather than a prototype unmanned starfighter.

Muroc III's Kármán line - The Kármán line is the theoretical outer boundary of a planet's atmosphere, defined as the point at which so little gas remains that an aircraft would have to be traveling faster than orbital velocity to maintain lift aerodynamically—which is impossible, since at that point it would be in orbit. There is no real consensus at present as to exactly where that is on Earth. NASA says 50 miles above sea level is it, close enough for (literally) government work; the Fédération Aéronautique International pegs it at 100 km (~62 miles); Theodore von Kármán himself, the originator of the concept, calculated it at around 52 miles up.

we don't throw them all in Takron-Galtos - One of the galaxy's most notorious super-high-security prisons, whence the Federation's worst criminals (and the United Galactica's before that) are traditionally consigned. Lorth Needa ended up there after Operation Archangel, and he didn't last long, either.

Wally Schirra and urine samples - Schirra was the prankster of the original Mercury astronaut group. He once left a five-gallon carboy mostly full of dyed water on Astronaut Office head nurse Dee O'Hara's desk, with a tag indicating it was the urine sample she had requested from him.

I know what it's like to have a day like that - She's referring to the time she was unwittingly "recruited" to serve as a Black Rose Duelist back at old Ōtori Academy.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I bid one failure to notice.

>
>"You're not a Cylon." "No, no I am not." - This is true!
>Boomer is not a Cylon.
>

I still hope to see more of Rogue Squadron at some point, if only to find out if Sharon's a BUMA or not.
>
>"Fuckhead, use the radio." - The "WDF hand signals" joke
>originated in a game of Phoenix Command, an '80s/'90s RPG
>probably best described as an extremely elaborate combat system in
>search of a game, that was played at WPI in the early '90s. The
>person playing the squad leader kept trying to do military hand
>signals by way of RP, and "you fuckhead, we have radios" was the
>reply.
>

ROFL!

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

--------------
Lime2K
The One True Evil Overlord
from the BSG board game, now tragically out of print. Great fun if you get a chance to play it!

Craig
(I don't recall Rogue Squadron 1-5.... or Rogue squadron in the EPU... I think....)

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."