====== The Farthest Ones from Home : A Battlestar Galactica/Space: Above and Beyond Crossover Story ======

Many of us love to hate the "reimagined" BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series which aired on the Syfy Channel a few years back.  The series started out with much promise in Seasons 1 and 2, but then seriously went off the rails in Seasons 3 and 4.  In particular, we hated the ending...finding out that the Earth was an uninhabitable radioactive hellhole and the Thirteenth Tribe were in fact a race of Cylons who had destroyed themselves thousands of years before the arrival of the Colonial fleet on Earth.  And worse yet, being told all this happened over 150,000 years ago, and both the humans and the Cylons of BSG were the distant ancestors of modern humans.

No, what we really wanted was for the Colonial Fleet to find OUR Earth...or better yet, a stronger, more technologically advanced version of it.  An Earth like the one shown in the 1990s television series, SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND. 

Well, if we can't see it on screen, we can at least read about it with this story by [[offtopic:robertp6165]]!  See what happens when the Colonial Fleet jumps into the Procyon system and encounters the U.S.S. SARATOGA and the 58th Squadron of United States Marine Corps Space Aviator Cavalry...the Wildcards!

This story-in-progress may be read [[http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=155109&highlight=Vansen|here]].

Two of [[offtopic:robertp6165]]'s all-time favorite science fiction shows were __Battlestar Galactica__ (both the original series from the 1970s and the new "reimagined" series produced in the mid-to-late 2000s) and __Space: Above and Beyond__, a short-lived series from the mid-1990s.  

__Space: Above and Beyond__ was set in the year 2063 and 2064, and imagined a united Earth at war with an unrelenting alien
foe, the Chigs.  The series followed the pilots of the 58th Squadron, United States Marine Corps Space Aviator Cavalry, as they struggled to survive amid the chaos and destruction of interstellar war.  It was an outstanding series, which unfortunately was cancelled after only one season. 

__Battlestar Galactica__ was an adventure tale based on the theories of various 1970s pseudo-historians who postulated that man might have come to Earth from another planet, rather than evolving here, and that there might be other humans, struggling to survive, on other planets in distant solar systems.  The premise of the show is that there were originally thirteen tribes of humans who evolved on a planet named Kobol.  A great disaster, hundreds of thousands of years ago, forced the various human tribes to leave Kobol and settle elsewhere.  Twelve tribes found homes on twelve planets circling stars in the same sector of the galaxy. The thirteenth tribe went into a completely different sector of the galaxy, very distant from the others, and settled separately.

Millennia later, the twelve tribes had formed a common government, called the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, and were at war with
the Cylons, a race of artificial life forms (in the original series, the Cylons were created by an alien, reptilian race which had long since died out, but in the reimagined series, the Cylons were created by men, and used as slaves before rebelling, igniting the Cylon Wars).  Eventually, through the collaboration of a human traitor named Baltar, the Cylons were able to overwhelm and virtually exterminate the human race on the Twelve Colonies.  About 50,000 refugees, fleeing aboard every space vessel which could be salvaged, survived the massacre.   These survivors were pursued by the Cylons, bent on wiping out what they thought were the last vestiges of humanity in the universe, as they sought out the home of the Thirteenth Tribe...a shining green planet known as Earth.

Like many, robertp6165 was disappointed with the direction the reimagined __Battlestar Galactica__ series went after the second season, and especially with the way the series ended (SPOILER ALERT: It was revealed in the final episodes of the reimagined __Battlestar Galactica__ that the story was actually taking place 150,000 years ago, that the "Earth" the Colonial Survivors were searching for was, in fact, not OUR Earth, and that the human and Cylon survivors of the final battle between the two groups had settled on OUR Earth to become the progenitorsof the human race as it exists today). 

Furthermore, robertp6165 noticed that the technology shown in the new version of __Battlestar Galactica__ was remarkably similar to that shown in __Space: Above and Beyond__.  The Space Carrier //U.S.S. Saratoga// was a good analogue of the //Galactica//, and the Vipers of //Galactica//'s fighter squadrons were roughly analogous to the Hammerheads of the //Saratoga//'s U.S. Marine Corps Space Aviator Cavalry Squadrons.

So, robertp6165 thought, why not mesh the two into one story? And take the opportunity to erase some of the worst elements of the reimagined __Battlestar Galactica__ Series, while keeping the good. 

First, robertp6165 thought, let's trash the horrible ending of the reimagined __Battlestar Galactica__ series...in fact, trash just about everything after Season 2.  Let's imagine that, instead of finding the planet of New Caprica at the end of Season Two, the Colonial fleet finds the Lion's Head Nebula, an important signpost to Earth.   Furthermore, let's assume that the Battlestar Galactica story is not set in the distant past, but in the near future.  The year is 2064, in fact, and the Earth they are seeking is the Earth as depicted in Space: Above and Beyond...an Earth actually capable of helping them against the Cylons.

Now that would have been a good story!

And so, robertp6165 decided to write it. If you'd like to read it, you may do so [[http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=155109|here]].

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