Originally Posted by mdorffler

Hey Bob, here's what happened;

Our marketing guys went and made a licensing deal with Hollywood on the Galactica series. They signed us up for the Viper and the Cylon without consulting us guys at all. We got a memo telling us what they had done and we needed to get started. Keith Niskern started the Viper while the rest of us sratched our heads how to do the Cylon. An undercambered semi-disk just isn't that aerodynamic, especially when it has bump like things all over the top side.

But we gave it a shot thinking maybe we could find a way to make it drive straight. We made a relatively accurate pattern and vacuum-formed several pieces for flight testing. We found right away it was a dead end to make go straight with the motor underneath. It would chase you all over the parking lot. But we already knew that was going to happen - we needed to show the marketing guys first hand what they bhad gotten us into. So we tried to sell them on the idea of putting it on the side of a long black BT-50 like a big base fin, and added a sub-fin for lateral stability. That was about all we could do. Marketing frowned, but presented it to Hollywood who of course said no. That was the end of the Battlestar Cylon. Sorry guys.

The Cygnus Probe got killed by the Disney marketing people too. This was after we had actually produced about 5,000 kits and were in the warehouse ready to ship. Disney, after the initial approvals in the early work, decided to change their mind, They didn't like Wayne's rendition afterall, hated the kit panel, and didn't like the decal either. They decided it wasn't represenative enough of the movie vehicle and since they had the final word, it was killed. We had considered changing the name and repackaging it but decided it wouldn't work. End of Cygnus. Sorry again, guys.

Originally Posted by mycrofte

That is why I never liked some of the movie kits, like the Death Star. You end up with an ungainly tube sticking out.

The only sane way to make a Cylon Raider would look like an axe.

Originally Posted by tbzep

The various spacecraft in question wouldn't be such far fetched designs as long as they stayed in space, but there were episodes where they flew in planetary atmospheres.

Originally Posted by luke strawwalker

True, but then lets not forget that they ARE supposed to be futuristic advanced technology type stuff-- we already have AIRCRAFT that are unstable and require a flight computer making constant minute adjustments to keep them controllable in atmospheric flight... in fact, instability is a hallmark of a good fighter design....