Forces in BSG are being driven by offstage powers but I must admit “there’s too much confusion” over their agenda right now, especially concerning Starbuck.

Starbuck is teleported to Earth and back, in a new viper, and she doesn’t really remember it well. In the viper are photos she took and little else. She describes some sights (and paints them in a mural) on the way back from Earth, the comet, ringed-planet and flashing triple star. They seem to be clues about the way to Earth.

But why such strange clues? If they just wanted to let Starbuck guide the fleet to Earth, they could have just given her coordinates. Or, while she was at Earth, she could have photographed a number of useful stellar signposts which would allow any trained interstellar navigator (which Starbuck is) to find it again. Great things to notice are the disk of the galaxy, close galaxies like Andromeda and the Magellanic clouds and prominent star clusters and nebulae like the Pleiades, M8/Lagoon and M13. And bright stars like Deneb and Antares can be seen for 20,000 light years. Getting a spectrograph on any bright stars would identify them and quickly position Earth.

Now to a good computer, the Zodiac will do the job once within a few hundred light years. You just have to search the stars you can see to find one that has the Zodiac pattern in its sky. The other sky-marks are for finding the area from further away.

Instead they give her these visions, which may be all in the same system. Ringed gas giants are everywhere, as are comets. Flashing triples are not common. It is not likely this is Alpha Centauri — and besides, get close enough to see that and the Zodiac takes you home anyway.

So why cryptic clues? Why a new viper, sure to make them distrust her, when powers like that could surely provide an old one too.  read more »