Talk:Timeline (RDM)/Archive5

• Archive 1 (July 28th, 2005 to November 31st, 2005):

Caprica Boomer's conception and morning sickness, Home II, Saul and Bill vs. The Evil Cylons, Untangling Season 2

 

• Archive 2 (January 7th, 2006 to March 22nd, 2006):

6 months?, Duration of Home, Part I, Roslin's life expectancy after "Epiphanies", When is the Presidential Election?, Timing of Events of Black Market and later episodes, The Ten Weeks thing in "Downloaded", Flight Of The Phoenix Chronology Note, Fine Tuning "Black Market" Through "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I"

• Archive 3 (March 22nd, 2006 to Present):

Timeline Image, Days v. Day, Dating "The Captain's Hand", Future Events, "Circa:" the enemy of all anal historians

the Colonial calender

Since Hero has revealed how the Colonial calender counts it's years and the the "current" year is 21,356 the timeline should be updated. (Alphaboi867 19:27, 19 November 2006 (CST))

I disagree with the usage of these dates, particularly in lieu of the document Baltar signed in "Precipice". -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 20:53, 19 November 2006 (CST)

• Indeed, the document gives that particular day as "3454-91". -- Troyian 21:23, 19 November 2006 (CST)

There's even a different (third) timekeeping system used on Adama's letter of resignation in "Hero". The Dossier is useful for pinning down relative dates, but I don't think we should read too much into the calendar system. --Peter Farago 01:25, 20 November 2006 (CST)

There's also a not-so-clear chart on Laura Roslin in "Epiphanies", which was located at the foot of her sickbay bed. We see this briefly and it is blurry enough not to make out specific numbers, but said document appears to be using a different dating structure as well. Also, given the Cimtar Peace Accords documents and Cylon Centurion Model 0005 in the mini-series, the documents should be treated with a healthy skepticism. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 10:13, 20 November 2006 (CST)

Another thought... in general, I have to say that we should probably avoid using in-universe dating, and go with keeping the dating system as simple as possible (using the Fall of the Colonies as a baseline). Since there is more than enough evidence thus far proving that the in-universe dating system is inconsistently applied, I believe using this would only lead to horrible inaccuracies, the bane of any reference's existence. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 10:13, 20 November 2006 (CST)

The Hero Continuity Discrepency

Given the amount of discussion it has generated on other BSG websites I have been surprised to note that the enormous continuity errors in Hero haven't been discussed here. Namely the error that Adama was on board Valkyrie 1 year before the attacks and was given command of Galactica afterwards as a retirement posting, yet in You Can't Go Home Again he states that he has commanded Starbuck "On THIS ship," for more than 2 years. There's also the problem that he served with Tyrol for 5 years (and Tyrol listed all of the battlestars he served on in Resistance and Valkyrie wasn't one of them), Gaeta for 3 years prior to the attack, Boomer for 2 years and Captain Kelly for some time as well (didn't he say 2 years as well in the mini?). I can see Adama taking Tigh with him from Valkyrie to Galactica, but 5 other crewmen as well? And a fairly random selection at that (a flight operations officer, a bridge officer, a nugget, a pilot, a deckhand, assuming Tyrol was in a more junior post at that time)? Plus only Tigh and Adama knew Bulldog. Starbuck and Tyrol seemed to have no idea who he was.

To add to the chaos, Adama seems to genuinely believe that he could have sparked the Attack on the Colonies. This is impossible as Adama served with Boomer for 2 years prior to the Attack, thus the Cylons were infiltrating the Colonies 1 year before the Valkyrie mission and Adama knows this. By itself, this seems to indicate that the Valkyrie mission must take place considerably earlier than it is claimed.

Possible solutions: 1) Adama was in charge of Galactica and went to Valkyrie to do this one special mission, requesting that Bulldog and Tigh go with him. UNLIKELY: Tyrol, Starbuck and Athena should still have recognised Bulldog (they missed a trick by not having Bulldog bump into Athena, recognise her as a Cylon and freaking out btw). Bulldog definitely was not on Galactica before as he wanted to know what Adama was doing on such an old ship. This is still problematic as Boomer's presence would tell Adama that the Cylons were already infiltrating the Colonies, thus his mission had nothing to do with the Attack.

2) The producers forgot about the year on New Caprica, so the Valkyrie mission was actually 2 years before the Attack. However, this causes problems in that Adama had still served with Gaeta and Tyrol by that point. Moving it back to 3 years before the Attack (meaning the producers forgot about the year on New Caprica and nine months the series spanned before that as well, which seems ludicrous) only gives us Tyrol to worry about and that can be explained by Tyrol being on Valkyrie (and serving on the other flight pod to the one Bulldog used and being in a junior position, so he never worked with him) and going with the Old Man to Galactica (and forgetting to list Valkyrie among his previous posts). That seems to be fine. The only problem with this is that this means that Bulldog was a prisoner of the Cylons for SIX years, not three, a very considerable difference.

Solution: There isn't one. At least with the last big screw-up (Flight of the Phoenix) it was possible to come to a conclusion by saying that episode took place over two to three months. With this problem, it seems totally self-contradictory (I wonder if RDM didn't do a podcast for this episode simply because he realised how messed up the timeline was).

EDIT: I just found some discussion on the Hero episode page, which basically seems to reach the same conclusion I did: there isn't an explanation except the dialogue in this episode is plain wrong. Oh well.--Werthead 16:24, 26 November 2006 (CST)

• If we're supposing that the current year is 21356 (based on Adama's 45 years in service beginning in 21311), this is the only explanation I've found that works in the timeline:

• D6/21311 First commission: Battlestar Galactica fighter squadron

...

• C2/21345 Commander: Battlestar Valkyrie
• C2/21348 Commander: Battlestar Galactica

...

• 21353 Commissioned for Valkyrie mission/Bulldog captured/Adama sent back to Galactica to retire (this wouldn't be on Adama's service record)
• 21354 Cylons attack the 12 Colonies
• 21356 Bulldog returns/Adama awarded medal of distinction.

Further explanation: Since the time frame is fuzzy, it could be explained in retrospect that Adama had already fallen out of favor with the Admiralty and been stationed on Galactica for 5 years before they gave him one final chance to return to his old ship and crew. If he succeeded, he'd resume command of the Valkyrie; if he failed, he'd gracefully retire with Galactica. He failed, but this time took Tigh with him. Bulldog was asking Tigh how he ended up on Galactica, not specifically Adama. This fits the dialogue AND the timeline, and would not appear on the service record due to it being a black-ops mission. --Empire279 19:56, 9 December 2006 (CST)

Unfinished Business

I just got done with this episode and it confused me a little over the timeline so I came here to try to clear it up, but I find I'm just further confused.

The events at the groundbreaking were 17 months before the episode and 8 months before the Cylon occupation of New Caprica. What confused me at first was since The Resistance covered the 4 months after the occupation, the exodus from New Caprica must have taken place 12 months after the groundbreaking, meaning the fleet has been traveliing again for 5 months. This didn't seem right to me, though I don't think there's anything essentially wrong with it - I just felt like it had been a shorter time.

But when I came here to try to clear it up I ran into this:

Day 660 (380th day since settlement): Cylon forces occupy New Caprica.

If this happened a year after the order to settle New Caprica (as shown in Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II), that would lead me to believe that the order was given on day 300. And that the grounbreaking was on day 420 (8 months before the occupation). But the timelime has these fixed at about Day 285 and Day 315 respectively.

The date of the settlement order isn't that bad - a difference of 15 days from what I expected could easily be rounded off to 1 year. But the groundbreaking listed at day 315 doesn't make any sense to me given the jump of one year in Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II and the fact that the groundbreaking was 8 months before the occupation (Unfinished Business).

Can anyone shed any light on this?

[EDIT] I thought about this a bit more, and while I was a little surprised at the dates involved, I think the biggest problem is why the groundbreaking for the colony is a full four months after the order to settle on New Caprica - something that is simply a problem from the show itself, and not something a timeline can work around.

--Jp Corkery 06:16, 7 December 2006 (CST)

Was it the groundbreaking for the colony of New Caprica City itself (which was already being settled) or for some building or structure there? --Peter Farago 19:10, 13 December 2006 (CST)

I too assumed it was the groundbreaking of some random building. However, the (unofficial) transcript says:

"(Baltar breaks ground o­n the settlement to the sound of applause and cheers; Jammer and Duck are there.)

Baltar: Thank you. Let this day be remembered as the day we broke ground for our new tomorrow."

I don't know. His rhetoric definitely sounds a bit grandiose for an administration building or a hospital (not to mention having the big party that was thrown). Troubling... --Steelviper 19:45, 13 December 2006 (CST)

I too believe it was for the settlement as a whole and not just a building, perhaps it was a little of both. The ground breaking could had been for the first permanent building for the settlement on New Caprica as opposed to mere tents and huts. At any rate, we are give hard dates in which to measure the passage of time and I agree that the non flashback events of Unfinished Business takes place five months after the events of Collaborators, I think that was the last time we were given a hard and fast date before Unfinished Business ("three days after the Second Exodus"). Also, I don't think it was just two days after the events of Hero that the events of Unfinished Business happened. I don't think after the bad beating Adm. Adama got at the hands of Lt. Novacek he would climb into a boxing ring just two days later, I don't think Doctor Cottle would allow it. I feel at least a week if not two seems more reasonable. And for the record I think it was more than a few days between Unfinished business and The Passage. I think two weeks at least feels more comfortable for the Colonials to detect the problem and then conduct a search while the fleets previously processed non contaminated food supply that people had in their cubbards and refrigerators a chance to deplete. From the looks at when Lee Adama, Starbuck and company wolfed down their remaining food it was a considerable amount of time between finding the problem to near starvation. It must be noted no matter what, Galactica is on a different time flow than we are. After all there have been only about 8 episodes (treat Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I & II, Occupation & Precipice and Exodus, Part I & II as three two hour episodes each) between the events of Downloaded and the birth of Hera (aired May 2, 2006); and the events in The Eye of Jupiter, when Athena learned that she was still alive (aired December 15, 2006). Only eight months have passed in our time but that is two years elapsed time in Galactica's timeline at least. Hunter2005 03:57, 21 December 2006 (CST)

When I watched I thought that it was the first permanent building as well, as opposed to provisional tents. And that they used that ocassion for a general celebration --Serenity 16:04, 22 December 2006 (CST)

Justification of the change of the timeline

I have just edited the time line from the benchmark Day 285 to 315 as outlined in the previous Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II timeline post. It is assumed by the previous person that posted it that the Colonials begin to land on New Caprica for permanent settlement in the thirty days between day 285 and day 315. I essentially split the difference and say they began to disembark civilians to the planet on day 300. That is day one of the settlement of New Caprica not when Baltar did the ground breaking ceremony, which I calculate to be approximately four months later or approximately day 420; that is Day 300 + 120 days=420. Now I derived this because the first flash back of Unfinished Business gave the dates "17 months ago, 8 months before the Occupation" or words to that effect. At the end of Lay Down your Burdens Part II a Doral unit said they spotted the light of Gina's nuclear blast that left the Fleet the year before. Now the Cylons may be derived from machines, computers, but they have not demonstrated that they are as exacting in speech and time measurement as the android Lt. Commander Data was or the Vulcans Spock, T'Pol, Tuvok were, or the former Borg "7 of 9" was in the various Star Trek series, so they estimate like humans. On the other hand also like humans I don't think they would round off eight months into a year. A full four months or 120 days is being chopped off doing that, so I believe when Doral said they noticed the blast of light that came from the vicinity of New Caprica a year ago (from the Colonial's perspective), I believe he means just about a year, give a week or two less or more than a year, not a full four months less than a chronological year. Also, I don't think it took four months for the Cylons to figure out where the blast came from. Just follow the flash of light and make a bee line for the source. From that, if the Cylons landed almost exactly a year later, then that ground breaking ceremony was four months after the first settlers landed on New Caprica since the occupation was stated to be eight months (240 days) in the future. From there, we know that the occupation lasted only four months (120 days) before the Exodus. That places the Exodus almost exactly one year after the ground breaking by Baltar on New Caprica. So you have 12 total months (385-365 days) of settlement in freedom on NC, then four months of occupation for a total of approximately 16 months or approximately 420 days.

In Unfinished Business it was stated that the events of Unfinished Business happened 17 months-about 510 days-after the ground breaking and eight months-240 days-before the occupation. Combine that with the total length of the occupation, four months or 120 days, that would mean that from the point of the ground breaking to the Exodus it is almost exactly 1 year or 12 months or 360-365 days in time.

Now you have approximately 17 months (approximately 510 days) from the ground breaking on New Caprica to Unfinished Business; minus approximately 12 months (365 days) from that groundbreaking to the events in Collaborators (which was three days after the Exodus); which equals approximately five months or 145-150 days left. That means that five months since the Exodus has elapsed between Collaborators and Unfinished Business. Now some of the dates are not exact given that some of them are estimates, especially the two week window the previous time line gave for the settlement of NC given previously: "Between c. Day 285 and c. Day 315". I as noted settled on day 300 that the settlement started allowing for the Galactica crew to do a two week survey of the location of New Caprica City.But the start of the settlement process could had started as much as two weeks later and still be plausible to meet Doral's "we noticed the nuclear blast in the time it took for light from it to reach us" explanation. However, given the hard dates we are given. It can be safely derived that five months have passed between Collaborators and Unfinished Business.

Incidentally I do disagree with the closeness of events in episodes as outlined after Collaborators. It seems that the original person who did it thinks the episodes happen within two or three days of one another. I don't think that is the case. As I just shown there is a five moth gap of time between Collaborators and Unfinished Business, plenty of room to spread out the three episodes in between-Torn, A Measure of Salvation and Hero. I think there is a need for a gap particularly between Hero and Unfinished Business. I don't think Adama would climb into a ring two days after being beaten so badly by Lt. Novacek. A gap of at the very least of a week should be there; more like two weeks. Even more so, I also think that there is a wide gap between Unfinished Business and The Passage. I don't think the Fleet would reach starvation levels within a month of the discovery of the contamination. They would need time to find a suitable planet as well. However, I did leave the two day gaps between episodes since I don't have any alternative time line regarding that, just common sense. Hunter2005 10:13, 21 December 2006 (CST)

I'm sorry, I can't stand by this. The Day 385 date was better in the asbsence of any knowledge to the contrary, and "Unfinished Business" does not supply that. The groundbreaking was explicitly not for the colony, which Dualla even remarked had existed for at least a month prior. --Peter Farago 05:22, 23 December 2006 (CST)

I happen to agree with you that New Caprica was being settled long before Baltar stuck his shovel in the ground. I thought I made that clear before, but I didn't so I am re-editing my previous post (the one you are answering). And while Unfinished Business doesn't supply an exact date as to when the first settlers landed, I think the Doral unit who answered Baltar when the Cylons arrived gave us a good idea. In Lay Down Your Burdens Part II A Doral said that they noticed the light of Gina's Nuclear blast just about then, which is why it took them a year to show up at New Caprica, given the speed of light. In other words the Cylons were about a light year away when Cloud 9 blew up. Since it is almost certain the settlement of New Caprica started soon after (the civilians were just itching to get out of the "boxes" that were the spaceships), and by settlement I mean putting up the first tents and huts with civilians living in them, that means the settlement started a year before the Cylon invasion. It took a year for the light of Gina's explosion to reach the Cylons. The ground breaking took place eight months before the Cylons came or roughly four months after the first settlers arrived. Again, I speculate that the ground breaking was for a permanent building in New Caprica City, perhaps the Administration/Detention Center? Maybe its original purpose was to be the New Caprica City city hall? Hunter2005 03:29, 25 December 2006 (CST)

Episode timeline slight adjustment

I spread out the episode incidences between day 800 of Collaborators and day 950 of Unfinished Business. I left the small time gap between Torn and A Measure of Salvation sincethe latter does occur very shortly after the former. In fact, I narrowed the gap between them to only one day. Again, I am trying to use common sense to get a feel as to when the episodes happened. From this I believe there was a gap of about two weeks between Hero and Unfinished Business because it would take about two weeks for Admiral Adama to recover from the beating Lt. Novacek gave him, but I think that beating gave Adama the idea of a boxing match to get the bile out of the system of the crew, seeing how "therapeutic" it was for both Saul and Novacek. Conversely I think only a day would be needed between the events of "Torn" and "A Measure of Salvation" to access the Cylons and formulate and execute a plan to recon the disabled Baseship. They don't want to wait too long less the Cylons come back. Hunter2005 13:08, 22 December 2006 (CST)

Good in principle, but I generally don't like guessing dates when we have nothing to go on. --Peter Farago 05:18, 23 December 2006 (CST)

I understand what your concerns are, but I think it is better than stacking them back to back to back. That is even more unrealistic IMHO. Having them back to back etc. is no more realistic a representation of when those events happened than spreading them out, in fact less so. At least some thought goes into it using common sense like my idea of not having Adama climb into a boxing ring in "Unfinished Business" allegedly two days after getting a beating from Novacek in "Hero". At least put a two weeks of daylight between the episodes to give the 60-odd year old Adm. Adama time to recover. And the five month gap between "Collaborators" and "Unfinished Business" is much more than guess work, it is using the on screen data available. Three episodes to spread out over five months leaves a lot of room (especially for those who write Battlestar Galactica novels) and if my guesstimate dates are wrong they can be moved when canon information is available. Hunter2005 19:19, 24 December 2006 (CST)

I wasn't responsible for any of the proposed dates for the third season content, so please don't read me as defending whatever was there before you made your contributions. My only concern is that it be clear to viewers that the third season dates are complete guesswork, as opposed to some of the second season dates which can at least be inferred from dialogue. --Peter Farago 03:28, 26 December 2006 (CST)

Major Cleanup Needed

Despite the great work many of us have put into this article, it has become bloated, fraught with inconsistancy and has failed to cite sources within its own text. I think that each of these issues need to be addressed here, and promptly. I have created subsections below for important conversations I believe we need to have. --Peter Farago 04:17, 26 December 2006 (CST)

Style Guidelines

How should this timeline be styled? Things to consider:

• Header structure - do we want to continue using one header per episode? How do we deal with events seen in flashbacks, or alluded to in dialogue? Bear in mind that too many headers creates a cluttery table of contents, but that headers are needed for article structure.
• Summary style - how detailed should episode summaries be? --Peter Farago 04:17, 26 December 2006 (CST)

I've normally stayed clear of this article, but last week I was ready to tear this apart after trying to read it through. For one, the episode summaries should hardly exist, with only the barest mention of the timeline item and a source link for more information. With the slowness of the holidays I may still go in and start cleaning this up (we can always re-add from the archived revisions).

A timeline must be linear or it makes no sense. As such, "flashbacks" are added in as with other data (these items are usually given some reference date for the audience anyway, making it easy to fit in). The timeline article should NOT be used for plotting continuity errors and the like. If an item has a bad fit, it should be placed in Continuity errors (RDM) in a special subsection (with a reference link on the central timeline article). The biggest problem with this article (aside from oversized episode summaries) is the fanwanking we do to try to get things to fit. --Spencerian 07:45, 26 December 2006 (CST)

Citation

Timeline entries must cite their sources, or when no source is available, provide or link to concise argumentation that takes into account all reasonable viewpoints (excluding patent fanwankery). How should this be done?

• Using citation templates would create a very long and complicated "notes" section, but would have the advantage of making organization easier.
• Alternatively, we could link to small articles in the Sources namespace, such as "Sources:Dates for Exodus, Part II" or "Sources:Exodus, Part II (Timeline)". --Peter Farago 04:17, 26 December 2006 (CST)

Consistancy

I believe that before we allow modification to existing rationalle, we should allow a reasonable window for debate (one week?) and that after modifications are made, they should be immediately promulgated to other articles which cite this one (including survivor count, and the battle chronology). --Peter Farago 04:17, 26 December 2006 (CST)

Re-imagined Series definition: Battlestar Group ^{(TRS: "Water")}. It also doubles as an acronym for the television series itself.

Re-imagined Series definition: student pilot ^{(TRS: "Act of Contrition", "Scar")}

Commander William Adama's nickname, used by officers aboard Galactica ^(TRS: "33")

Re-imagined Series definition: the process of using the FTL engines to make an near-instantaneous apparent faster-than-light transport of a ship from one point in space to another