ARTEMIS BATTLESTAR | A revolutionary but flawed ship

well I've covered the absolute unit that is the Mercury class went over the Jupiter the class of the venerable old Galactica herself and now the last Colonial Battle Star gets his time to shine wait no no no I remember you're here as well you you definitely exist let me rephrase that earlier sense today we're covering the last good Colonial battle star and a blast from the past the original Galactica the pioneer of battl Star Galactica itself the Artemis class coming right from the old BSG 1978 with a facelift for the modern day through the deadlock video game this ship was the very first battle star and was at the core of a unique amazing sci-fi Universe just waiting to be explored and then we got a schlocky generic sci-fi romp that got butchered by terrible management ridiculous production costs bad writing interference from the Publishers and this stupid stupid nightmare fuel dog that was just a monkey in a suit but despite the generally Mech execution from the original there was that spark of Brilliance that sucked people in and still holds the imagination and love of fans today probably a little excessively in my opinion I should know having the thought that the original was bad in anyway brings them out of the woodwork like sylon Raiders eager to faceplant their ships directly into my bridge dear God please stop so today's video is going to be covering the technical aspects of the ship like its weapons dimensions and works as well going over its history and lore and how it was used but before we get into things introductions generic greetings and welcome to science and Sanity a channel dedicated to bringing my love of sci-fi and all its Majestic glory to you the viewer if you enjoy the video then leave a like subscribe comment all that since it really does help a channel like this fight the algorithm and we make Niche content so boy oh boy do we need it or if you're feeling generous then check out size patreon and consider buying me a coffee or if you just want to hang out with other turbo nerds we have a Discord as well everything linked Below in the video description and with that the Artemis now there's one really important thing I need to go over before we really get into the details and the gribly fun bits that everyone came for and that would be the fact that this ship exists in a weird position within the BSG Cannon more specifically it has two separate LS first is the original from 1978 the first battl Star Galactica show the second is the expanded lore from the remat master and the game Battlestar Galactica deadlock in order to square away the differences in the stories and stuff characters and settings and all that from the original to the remaster they separated them into alternate universes and decanonized the original so essentially the 1987 version is an alternate timeline story while the remaster is the quote unquote true Battlestar Galactica argue and complain about that all you will but it's just that's the reality when it comes to the lore it's just it is what what it is coupled with the fact that the original was barely fleshed out and had a lot less in the way of background info and topics to actually discuss I'm going to be using the modern take on the ship and mixing in a little bit of the old stuff as well where I can but for the most part it's just going to be on the modern remaster so with that explanation out of the way let's start with his history and this is where the emis is arguably the most interesting out of all the Battle Stars unlike the Jupiter which was a response to the threat of sylon hacking and subversion or the Mercury which was Modern and advanced enough to resist it while bringing overwhelming utility and Firepower the emis was the very first attempt by the Colonials unifying all the successful design elements of previous ship classes while things like the Janis were pre-unification design focused on missiles overwhelming Munitions fire and decent armor it lacked the speed true survivability and raw Firepower to stand up to peer ships if they got in close enough to punch punch the Janice in the teeth at the extreme other end you have the Minotaur an older design focused on impenetrable armor and overwhelming raw weight of guns and it also happened to be slow as molasses flowing uphill in Winter entirely devoid of anything else besides armor and guns meaning it was extremely vulnerable to being kited harassed or outflanked from its effective engagement distance and angles then we have things like the atlas which is a dedicated carrier meant to and excelling at ordinating entire formations of colonial snub Fighters and bombers yet its massive size lacking armor and pitiful Armament means its Fighters are often unavailable or otherwise engaged and that leaves the ship extremely vulnerable and this is where the Artemis comes in like the Kool-Aid man on crack because this ship went it I'm doing it all myself the Artemis pioneered the Battle Star as a ship class all its own carrying incred incredibly heavy armor the distinctive alligator head design that all the rest would follow containing the important command and control bits the aremis was one of if not the most survivable and Powerful ship that the Colonials had ever built up until that point but unlike the Minotaur it was also fast flexible and brought along its own support equipped with variable Munitions launchers on the dorsal and ventral side of the ship the Artemis could launch an array of weapons from sensor and decoy drones to Mine Fields Rockets conventional missiles and the Sun at whatever it deemed Unworthy of Life coupled with the two flight pods giving it equivalent or Superior fighter capacity and control to other Colonial options the emis was a genuinely terrifying ship that had the ability to strike targets at both extreme and close range in pretty much any engagement or any situation the emis was miserably tough to deal with and Incredibly scary the original angry brick of guns if you will I know I called the Jupiter the OG gun brick in its video but I mean like look at this thing it's all blocks and gun barrels that's all it is square however the most powerful part of the ship was when it managed to get in reasonably close and this was a hilarious mistake for any enemy that allowed this thing to close ranks because of not only did it have a multitude of Point defense guns and smaller caliber weapons scattered prodigiously across the ship oh no it was also monstrously powerful with the battl star artillery a new form of kinetic kill weapons basically ginormous guns These Are A Step Above what pretty much every other ship at the time had larger longer range more powerful and just as fast firing the Battlestar artillery mounted to the back of the Artemis was devastating capable of cracking lighter sylon ships in half with single volleys and pummeling Bay stars to scrap and slag during sustained bombardment the Artemis was a force to be reckoned with long range close range assault defense support or Frontline brawler it didn't matter this ship was a monster that United the best ideas and Concepts that the Colonials had overwhelming Firepower impenetrable armor huge fighter wings and a level of flexibility and competence that made it the perfect anchor for a fleet acting as the command or Flagship but aside from the summary I just gave the really interesting thing about this ship is the time it was developed and the unique weaknesses it has and its history as the emis while an amazing ship that held the gates during the early years of the human sylon War it suffered all the classic Hallmarks of a new weapon system or platform like tanks planes and missiles did in the real world when they were first developed to start with the Artemis was designed very early on in the timeline and although there's no concrete proof of this the Artemis seems to be a preyon war design the reason I say this is because of context clues that's right we're reading between the lines and actually using our brains the exact opposite of what most super fans do in something that's very very scary but hold it together we can get through this described by sin and quaade in deadlock as sturdy and Powerful but also economical to the point of ubiquity and reference in official material as being fielded in large numbers during the early days of the war the way it's described suggests that the Colonials had huge numbers of these ships or at least a pretty significant amount of them just kicking around right at the start of hostilities it also possesses far far more powerful computers and command infrastructure than previous Colonial vessels and in lore is also far more advanced electronically than the Jupiter was knowing that the 12 colonies of man were disunited and Waring on and off before the toaster Menace popped up it makes sense that the Artemis would have been a pre-war development powerful computers to act as a command of control Flagship for any battle Fleet the unification of several design elements from older and less reliable ships that were being phased out from the Imperial era of the colonies remember old ships like the Janice are aging hulks from the era when the 12 colonies weren't fully settled and the Imperial Wars between vergon and leonis were in full swing so replace ing several old ships with the most modern multi-roll capable vessel seems like a great idea for the powers that be and since it's economical enough even some of the poorer or less developed colonies would most likely be able to purchase or field some of these ships so I've come to the conclusion that the emis was a preyon war design maybe if only by a few years maybe a decade that proved to be remarkably effective against The Toasters by pure dumb luck and was thus pushed to the front of production and repair cues however while the emis was Advanced and extremely powerful it had several key flaws in its design and implementation most notably the flight pods engines and computer systems now on the surface these are fantastic design elements that went on to be even more important on future Battle Stars so calling them mistakes is kind of ridiculous but let me explain it isn't the parts themselves but how they were implemented and designed on the Artemis the Artemis doesn't need to retract its flight pods like the Jupiter does and this is because its computer systems and FTL Drive are powerful enough to create a jump bubble significantly outside the ship something only later and more advanced Battle Stars like the valkyrie Mercury or manura could do but this came at the downside that the computers couldn't be dellink or reduced in scope to protect against sylon hacking otherwise the flight pods could be damaged or ripped off during an accidentally miscalculated jump and should you try to add in the mechanisms to allow the pods to retract you'd end up digging into the central structure and by necessity need to rip into the FTL Drive power plant and artillery systems ofid ships if you did that then the engines those massive bricks that allow the Artemis to push a frankly frightening level of speed maneuverability for its size would need to be drastically scaled back as you see on many of the other much larger ships and hell even the armor like I mentioned while vastly Superior to other small smaller Colonial ships was still laughable compared to Future Battle Stars and couldn't be improved since the intricate array of flat guns and point defenses would need to be rebuilt to accommodate it even in the original series we see sylon Raiders Channel their inner Orcs from 40K and come to give Adama the famous flying Ed butt for the for okay for anyone who's for anyone who's not familiar with 40K uh the tabletop has a rule for orc planes or fighter bombers where the pilot can choose to fly at at an attempt to headbutt a Target while still in the plane Orcs are great man I I love them they're so funny they're just happy green little guys enjoying life and life is war and godamn it is war fun but in its most simple form the Achilles heel of the Artemis is that it has no ability to be refit or modified described as notoriously difficult to refit the Artemis was the Prototype and floor plan for all future Battle Stars but the new technologies and Design Elements meant that the ship wasn't really future proof and had a lot of teething issues in the design it had no extra room the systems were entirely dependent on one another there was no flexibility because no one at the time of its design thought about needing to upscale improve or change it until the need arose and that is a bit of a flaw for the people who designed it but I mean it's reasonable nobody expects their kitchen to Stage a revolution on them one morning but still it is a problem with his design this meant that as a singular package in its base configuration the Artemis worked well but that's it it worked it couldn't be made fully prepared for the fight against the syons it couldn't be upgraded or refit in order to meet changing Battlefield conditions and it didn't have the ability to be modeled or repaired for a different version of it like an Artemis Mark 2 it just couldn't be done and presumably because of this they suffered quite heavily from syon hacking in electronic warfare and that is why I described it as having the same teething problems as all new weapon systems because it did it worked to do what you intended it to but once extenuating circumstances or unexplained threats or changing Battlefield conditions started showing up it just didn't have the staying power or capacity to adapt hence why it was rapidly phased out once the Jupiter was put into production and why it never received the refits and upgrades many many other ship classes went through during the human sylon War though honestly I think one of the biggest flaws with the Artemis was its Viper launch tubes they just couldn't handle newer craft the only ships that fit into them properly were the Vipers Mark 1 and two the much larger Mark 3s and even the later Mark sevs that we see in presumably all the ships in between are significantly too big mized wide whatever that they wouldn't be able to use the launch tubes so the emis puts the Colonials in the position in the future of either needing to maintain produ and support for older inferior technology and equipment to keep the Artemis stocked or sacrifice the artemis' ability to carry Fighters or just get rid of the ship entirely and all of those are pretty terrible options but with that we come to the close of the history and life of the Artemis Battle Star regardless of his fault this this beautiful boat right here is the source of everything else Battlestar Galactica it's the pioneer of one of the most unique sci-fi designs ever and arguably nothing has even come close to to touching it in the years and decades after in terms of its look and style while I'll never agree that the original is better than the remaster I don't really like the original at all I will admit and agree with people who say that the original designs were fire this is brilliant and I don't blame or fault people who fell in love with BSG 1978 because my God there is still so much to love about it but there is still more we need to talk about the technical aspects and the tactics employed in battle and since I like listing off massive numbers for fun because neuron activation and dopamine hit we'll start with the technical aspects of this thing coming in at just over a kilometer in length 400 m wide at the edges of the flight pods and 100 m tall at the engines the Artemis is around 20 to 30% smaller than the Jupiter class and this carries over into its Armament and capabilities equipped with a main battery of eight main artillery turrets and 16 barrels of you the emis assuming a Target is slightly above and in front of it can bring an utterly withering amount of Firepower to bear however unlike its successors it actually has a mixed Armament future Battle Stars would almost entirely rely and go into the heavy battl star artillery as their main weapons and then just slap on a bajillion Point defense and flat guns which are kind of on the scale of what you'd see mounted to smaller snub craft like a Viper or a Raptor but the Artemis carries over some of the design features from pre- Battle star ships and has a secondary complement of four heavy kinetic turrets on the flight pods the kinds of guns that you would see on the smaller and older Battleship or brawler style vessels in the colonial Arsenal supplementing and supporting the main and secondary guns is a frankly incorrect number of Point defense weapons so here's the thing the official listed info on the Artemis is 16 point defense turrets and that number is from deadlock the game and is about all we have when it comes to the Artemis unlike the Jupiter or Mercury which we see close-ups of and CG shots of their guns firing and there is a lot of information like canonical spoken about by the creators the Artemis just doesn't have that the only appearance of technical information we really have is from the video game so we get to extrapolate things out and instead of just listing off that 16 guns I'm going to fudge things a little bit and say 16 point defense arrays and each array is made up of at bare minimum several dozen guns all working together to saturate an area of space with the Holy wall of flak Blessed Be its name that we all know and love that keeps things in line with what we see in the game and what we know from lore available for other Battle Stars like the Jupiter that canonically has 500 guns plastered all around it this way I can confidently say that the emis has hundreds of guns let's say like around 350 to 400 that seems like a pretty reasonable number throwing up enough lead to make 1920's fuel companies and auto manufacturers raise an eyebrow in serious concern but those 16 point defense arrays are mostly along the two flight pods flanking the Viper launch tubes with a few more of them along the sides of the armored alligator head so it does leave the dorsal ventril for and after of the ship significantly exposed while having a screen of immunity to all incoming Fighters and Munitions along the broad sides of the ship but considering Colonial vessels love to present broadside fire it's not that big of a weakness similarly when it comes to the fighter compliment the Artemis carries we don't have concrete numbers we can however extrapolate based on the Jupiter once again and before I continue if anybody actually does have like concrete this is how many fighters it has numbers let me know in the comments because I couldn't find anything trolling through through the wikis or interviews with the developers or anything like that it seems like just a a completely lost number in lore versions of the Jupiter before it got its Midway refit placed the Squadron numbers roughly around eight with 20 vipers each the Jupiter had around 160 snub craft in total plus a few odds and ends Raptors and shuttles here and there I I really hope that number is accurate because I did a video on the Jupiter and if those numbers aren't accurate I'm going to look like an absolute tool if I got it wrong you know what it the motto here at size entertainment over accuracy even if I have to be confidently incorrect so we're just going to roll with it extrapolating that out the emis being significantly smaller it would stand to reason that the ship carries around 100 to 120ish small craft but because of its dual flight pods and relatively High number of Viper launch tubes and those relatively competent computer systems the Artemis Can field and sustain roughly the same number of squadrons on the deck as the Jupiter can at any given time time at the downside of having significantly smaller reserves when it comes to the ship's Munitions Arsenal the Artemis similar to all other Battle Stars has a bank of multi munition launch tubes on the dorsal side or the top between the midship artillery batteries and the armored prow these launchers are shown to only fire about a dozen missiles at a time or a single large Warhead like a nuke though this is mostly for balance in the game and in all likelihood the Artemis just like her older sisters has hundreds of conventional missiles ready for use Rapid firing and reloading missile tubes and a backup of at minimum though likely more from what we've seen of the other Battle Stars when they're fully combat loaded the most notable aspect of the ship however are the engines while the Artemis has a huge engine bay at the back and is arguably one of the most instantly noticeable parts of the ship they're actually six independent armored thrusters and unlike a lot of smaller ships we see the reason for this is pure speed vessels like the manacor Janis or adamant use their engines not only for forward thrust but for turning as well which is why we see them spread out to the very edges of the ship while the Artemis just like all future Battle Stars has a hybrid system where the rear engines produce an enormous amount of forward power and can assist with maneuvering but the primary system for turning and getting around is a series of smaller retro and control thrusters spread across the ship's bulk as we see with the Pegasus during its escape from the syons or the multiple times the Galactica turns to engage incoming threats this system the Battle Stars in general despite their incredible size are capable of turning deceptively fast and reacting to targets at frightening speed and for all of this the crew was surprisingly small still massive don't get me wrong like that's a small City's worth of people right there but small for a battle star while the Galactica would optimally have 3 and 1 12,000 crew with between 3 to 500 more Marines on board for combat operations the aremis made do with little over 3,000 Personnel including its Marine complement though this was a bit of an issue that left the ship vulnerable to boarding as it only had about 100 to 150 Marines on board but all in all the Artemis was a vastly cheaper ship to crew operate and use compared to most later Battle Stars in fact I think the emis gets done really dirty by the updated lore when it was built it was unquestionably the heaviest biggest strongest warship ever built then like 50 years later when the Mercury was rolling around casually being the best thing ever the emis gets downgraded to a light Battle Star and sometimes depending on the source a pocket Battle Star which is ridiculous because it puts this thing on par with the Orion or Valkyrie class and that it's just that is just objectively not accurate for its size Done Dirty done wrong disrespecting my boy like that and for the last section I want to talk about how it was used I briefly mentioned it a few minutes ago but the emis was a command and assault ship while they were deployed in large numbers right off the rip they wouldn't normally be used like the Jupiter or Mercury those ships were employed in Battle Star groups that consisted of anywhere from three to five vessels and this was immense Overkill the kind of force you could probably rfle stomp right through the center of a sylon FL with and not give a single but not the Artemis despite its numbers being most likely way above the Jupiter at its prime the emis was often used as the only Battle Star leading a flotilla of smaller ships rarely they would operate in pairs but for the most part one is what you would find and that's because of what they could do most Colonial ships were extremely vulnerable to sylon hacking and missile barges as the Colonials didn't have the raw numbers to intercept them nor The Brute scale of Firepower to stop syon assaults during those early days which is what led to such crushing sylon victories in the opening salvos of the war so the solution was to embed the Artemis into existing Colonial fleets and position it closest to the enemy the idea was to have the Artemis create a sort of barricade its heavy armor looming guns and flax screen being able to do the heavy lifting of protecting the battle Fleet behind it this freed up Viper squads from doing anti-missile and fighter duty to go on offensive action in instead it also meant that the various other ships could use the Artemis like cover hugging the edges of the ship's control Zone and firing their powerful broadsides across it and into sylon ships should they ever come under sustained fire smaller vessels could dive behind the artemis' flax screen or the ship itself to catch a breather and stay combat capable this was made all the more effective because of the artemis' ability to coordinate the fleet designate targets Focus Firepower and generally be a right pain in the ass for sylon tactics and before anyone brings up that I'm talking out my ass I am not I'm extrapolating a little bit again but it is reference that this is how they were used and we see multiple times with the tactics employed by Cain and Adama when protecting smaller ships it's customary for a battle star to put themselves directly in the way and use their flak armor and Mass to protect anything else that can't fight and some people in response might ask well why not use them in large groups anyways go on the offensive smash the syons in decisive open battles well the simple reason is that this isn't the United Colonial Fleet of the late or inter War period what you see in that era is fleets of Battle Stars hundreds of them around every world that the Colonials deem important enough to protect but at this point things were far far less stable many of the colonies were still suspicious of one another many of the poorer ones had little more than frigs and Corvette class ships if anything at all while the larger colonies the old Empires still maintain their massive fleets of heavy warships and cruisers the Artemis was an equalizer it let the Colonials ensure that any battle fleet was capable even if they were stationed over like aerelon for example the dirt poor farming world at least I think it was aerelon there's a couple of holes in the colonies but anyways the aremis could coordinate and effectively use those smaller or older War ships that they had while alongside the much larger much more competent fleets it could effectively bring that weight of fire power and armor to Bear against the syons coordinating them for maximum effect could it have worked more effectively in dedicated Battlestar fleets most definitely but that would have meant leaving the mismash of inflexible poorly coordinated often at odds mistrusting fleets of smaller older ships in the various colonies to their own devices and we see in the lore that when left to their own devices at the start of the sylon Rebellion the colonies were losing badly during those opening months so the emis was used as a stop Gap a way to effectively protect and bring to bear the might of the colonial war machine while its industry and Engineers began producing ships that were capable of actually winning the war and that concludes functionally everything about the ship the Artemis Battle Star the vessel that pioneered the iconic design we all know and love the original gun brick and Galactica and the ship that planted its feet in the dirt and held the line against the mechanical hordes while mankind rallied reinforcements and weapons and again I know a lot of people love the original but there just isn't enough information or depth to really talk about it plus I was originally going to make this video on the original series because you know topical but after rewatching like six episodes of the OG series and read in the wiki to get in the head space I I felt my will to live dying seriously this thing literally a chimp in a suit worst idea ever is Jar Jar Binks levels of cringe and my God I know the production was expensive but but please sir just a little more maybe maybe one extra CG scene I'm tired of watching the same 15-second effect shot on Loop for hours with the occasional variety of just mirroring it for a little bit of extra flare once in a while you know come to think of it I probably should make a video talking about the original it might be fun but I know that my unfiltered opinion would probably make people mad I like a lot about it but I dislike a lot more nah I'll probably put it on the back burner it'll happen eventually anyways that's that ladies and ah who am I kidding you're probably all dudes like me sitting in your nerd caves painting minis Andor rewatching Star Trek TNG for the 40th time but you are my audience and supporters so a huge thanks to size patrons your support is greatly appreciated and goes a long way on the back end to make make life easier you guys pay for my groceries please don't stop otherwise it's back to college student diet of ramen bread and shitty beer for me and to all the members of the $5 tier a special thanks to David G the original Auggie 11 Bravo crunchy Terry Higgins Pedro munas David G the other one Vox apol on Phoenix BT Legend Electro boy 11 Logan mayor Mickey David Armon Crome Robin stop at Fen Striker Tachi tan he's Deb pixie Veris fabric 445 andj V Bob Mini crustation Char the snap paully Eric Jones Joseph holiday zombie Berserker David B sweet be rastro La butcher stabby Taco nwam Brian Hall Joshua J Lee John Gabrielle the hay Fork unit zero tarli Bob Douglas jerma kiwi Warrior Jason vgo screaming sta Darius D exothermic and Rosco 292 thank you all very much for your support hope it'll continue in the future and with that the video is functionally over the OG Bas star and radar are better than the remastered version but the OG syon is a bucket and I'm glad the design in lore died

Channel: SCIENCE INSANITY

Views: 84,677

Keywords: battlestar galactica, battlestar, bsg, colonial viper, galactica, viper mark 7, adama, battlestar galactica reimagined, Science, insanity, science insanity, battlestar galactica lore, sharon valerii, mercury battlestar, mercury battlestar lore, jupiter battlestar, william adama, colonial battlestar, science fiction, SCI, lee adama, battlestar pegasus, bsg pegasus, pegasus, artemis battlestar, battlestar galactica deadlock, artemis, deadlock, bsg 1978, battlestar galactica 1978

Id: SEiPZxvZPnY

Length: 30min 1sec (1801 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024