Skirmish Over the Red Moon

Battle before: Battle of Ragnar Anchorage
Battle after: Battle for the Tylium Asteroid

Starbuck's damaged Viper and the Cylon Raider are caught in the Red Moon's gravity field
Skirmish over the Red Moon
Conflict	Second Cylon war
Date	Day 14
Place	An unnamed red moon
Result	Marginal Colonial victory
Combatants Remnants of the Colonial Fleet Cylons Commanders Lieutenant Kara "Starbuck" Thrace Unknown † Strength 2 Vipers 8 Raiders Casualties 1 Viper destroyed, 1 damaged 7 Raiders destroyed, 1 captured

A skirmish that occurs when a scouting group of 8 Cylon Raiders surprises a group of nugget Viper pilots under instruction by Lt. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace in the orbit of an unnamed Red Moon orbiting a gas giant. It was the first time the Cylons are able to find battlestar Galactica after it's escape in the Battle of Ragnar Anchorage (and subsequent chase in "33").

Starbuck orders the trainees to return to Galactica while she engages all eight Raiders at once. However, Cadet Hot Dog disobeys and follows her to cover her wing. This succeeds in dividing the Raiders enough between the two Vipers that Starbuck has a chance to shoot them down. Hot Dog succeeds in destroying one Raider (his first kill in a Viper) before suffering damage from incoming fire, pulling back from the engagement. By this point Starbuck destroys all but one Raider, and the two fighters make a final run at each other.

Both the Raider and Starbuck's Viper exchange fire and are critically damaged. Both fighters tumble out of control and descend into the Red Moon's gravity well. The Raider softly crash-lands onto the moon, but Starbuck ejects from her Viper after she could not break it out of its flat spin towards the moon's surface. Galactica recovers Hot Dog and his Viper.

Starbuck lands by parachute on the moon, severely injuring her knee after being dragged by her parachute toward boulders on the moon's surface. She wanders on the moon until she finds the crashed Cylon Raider, braindead from its wounds but otherwise intact. Starbuck is able to find a way inside, and discovers for the first time the bio-mechanical nature of the new generation of Raiders.

Inside, Starbuck finds oxygen to stay alive after she exhausts her flight suit's life support, and determines how to control the Raider by manipulating its internal organic actuators. Starbuck's strong flight instructor skills and test-pilot savvy allows her to determine the basic mechanics of new spacecraft quickly.

Starbuck seals up the damage that the Raider received after Starbuck's Viper shot it by using a portion of her flight suit to seal the damage and repressurize the interior of the fighter. Starbuck flies the Raider off the moon and returns to Galactica once Apollo successfully identifies her as the pilot of what would normally be an enemy target.

This is the first time Colonial forces are able to capture and examine the new Cylon Raider version. Chief Galen Tyrol and his deck crew spend the next several weeks analyzing the fighter and eventually returns it to flight status with significant internal modifications for effective human control ("Act of Contrition", "You Can't Go Home Again", "Six Degrees of Separation", and "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II").