Developed by Dr. Gaius Baltar, the Command Navigation Program (CNP) was a program utilized by the Colonial military forces and some civilian spaceshipsTemplate:Ref in the Twelve Colonies. Installed in the central computers of Vipers and Raptors and in the navigation computers of almost all battlestars, the CNP was a contrivance of more than two years in the making.
Unbeknownst to Baltar, a lover and co-writer of the CNP turned out to be a version of the Cylon agent viewers know as Number Six. She programmed backdoors into the program so that the Cylon attack force could break through the Colonial firewalls and attack their computers systems with Cylon computer viruses. Ships with the CNP that received a command from attacking Cylon ships would, in the case of Vipers, be shut down "as if a switch were flipped." Petty Officer Dualla described reports of "system failures" throughout the Fleet and how at least one battlestar lost power when the attack began, which indicate the Cylons used the CNP to damage and in at least one case disable capital ships as well.
The CNP was distributed as with all Colonial software updates via the Colonial Defense Mainframe, where Six had unrestricted access on Baltar's authorization.
The CNP was received by battlestar Galactica, but the program was never loaded into primary memory of the ship, although her last squadron of Viper Mark VIIs (led by CAG Jackson Spencer) received the upgrade. As a result, the squadron was massacred by two Raiders on their way back to Caprica (Miniseries).
Lieutenant Felix Gaeta had the program code purged from the mainframe on Baltar's suggestion, and the program was also retrograded on the flight systems of Galactica's surviving Mark VII Vipers and Raptors.
Sources[edit]
- Template:Note Aaron Doral provides a requested report to Gaius Baltar in CIC: "You asked for a report on how many civilian ships had your CNP program?" (Miniseries)