| All Battlestar Galactica productions share the premise that in a distant part of our galaxy, a human civilization lives on a group of planets known as the Twelve Colonies, to which they have migrated from their ancestral homeworld of Kobol. The Twelve Colonies have warred for decades with a cybernetic race known as the Cylons, whose goal is the extermination of the human race. The Cylons offer peace to the humans, which proves a ruse. With the aid of a human named Baltar (an inadvertent aid in the 2003 version), the Cylons carry out a massive attack on the Twelve Colonies and on the Colonial Fleet of starships that protect them. These attacks devastate the Colonial Fleet, lay waste to the Colonies, and virtually destroy their populations. Scattered survivors flee into outer space aboard available spaceships. Of the entire Colonial battle fleet, only the Battlestar Galactica, a gigantic battleship and spacecraft carrier (analogous to an aircraft carrier), appears to have survived the Cylon conflagration. Under the leadership of Commander Adama, the Galactica and the pilots of "Viper" fighters lead a fugitive fleet of survivors in search of the fabled thirteenth colony known as Earth. |
