Skirmish Over the Red Moon

Skirmish Over the Red Moon
	Starbuck's damaged Viper and the Cylon Raider are caught in the Red Moon's gravity field
	Starbuck's damaged Viper and the Cylon Raider are caught in the Red Moon's gravity field
Summary
Conflict:	Second Cylon war
Date:	Day 14
Related Episode(s):
Place:	An unnamed red moon
Result:	Marginal Colonial victory
Combatants
Remnants of the Colonial Fleet	Cylons
Commanders
Lieutenant Kara "Starbuck" Thrace	Unknown †
Strength
Viper 1104, 1 other Viper MkII	8 Raiders
Materiel Losses
1 Viper destroyed, 1 damaged	7 Raiders destroyed, 1 disabled and captured
Casualties
None	(8 Cylon Raiders)
[[Colonial battles chronology ({{{series}}})\|Battle Chronology]]

The Skirmish over the Red Moon is a battle between eight Cylon Raider that surprise a group of nugget Viper pilots under instruction by Lt. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace in the orbit of an unnamed reddish moon orbiting a gas giant. It is the first time the Cylons encounter battlestar Galactica after its escape in the Battle of Ragnar Anchorage.

Starbuck orders the nuggets to return to Galactica while she engages all eight Raiders at once. However, Cadet Hot Dog disobeys and follows her general order of always having a wingman.

Hot Dog succeeds in dividing the Raiders enough between the two Vipers long enough for Starbuck to shoot down six fighters. Hot Dog destroys one Raider (his first kill in a Viper) before suffering damage from incoming fire, pulling back from the engagement.

Starbuck destroys all but one Raider, and the two remaining fighters make a final run at each other.

Both the Raider and Starbuck's Viper exchange fire. The Raider's "pilot" is hit, but the ship remained intact. Starbuck's Viper experiences electrical problems during the battle, which first causes her fighter's communications and transponder to go offline. Damage inflicted later by the Raider disables the Viper's flight controls.

Both fighters tumble out of control and fall into the red moon's gravity well. The Raider softly crash-lands onto the moon, but Starbuck must eject from her Viper after it goes into an uncontrollable flat spin towards the moon's surface. Galactica recovers Hot Dog and his critically damaged Viper.

Starbuck lands by parachute on the moon, severely injuring her knee after being dragged by her parachute toward boulders and a cliff on the moon's surface.

With a broken wireless handset, she wanders on the moon looking for higher ground to await rescue. In her travels, she finds the crashed Cylon Raider she had fought earlier. Starbuck finds a way inside the Raider and discovers the bio-mechanical nature of the new generation of Raiders. Starbuck's attack of the Raider had left the "pilot" of the Raider shot in its "head," leaving it brain-dead.

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 the new spacecraft quickly.

Starbuck repairs the damage she inflicted on the Raider by using a portion of her flight suit to seal the hole 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 updated Cylon Raider. Chief Galen Tyrol and his deck crew spend the next several weeks analyzing the fighter, eventually returning 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", "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down", and "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II").

The Raider is later lost on Caprica during the events to retrieve the Arrow of Apollo, when Caprica-Valerii steals it from Starbuck at the Delphi Museum of the Colonies.