Ship of Lights

The Ship of Lights is an advanced spacecraft from the original "Battlestar Galactica" television series, first seen in the episode "War of the Gods". The ship is neither a product of the Colonies, the Cylons, nor the Terrans, (a minor spacefaring human race introduced late in the series who had no connection to the Colonies or Earth).

The Ship of Lights is significantly faster than any known spacecraft, and appears to have the ability to simply show up wherever needed instantly. Its drive system emits an extremely loud sound which somehow travels through the void of space and can be heard by people in nearby spaceships. The sound of this drive system is sufficient to render any human nearby unconscious. The Ship of Lights also carries an unspecified number of smaller craft which appear as balls of light. These smaller craft move so quickly that they can outrun laser blasts fired directly at them. The Ship of Lights itself is quite large, comparable to the size of a Battlestar or Cylon Basestar, though its exact size, crew complement, and capabilities are largely unknown.

The ship is crewed by an apparently humanoid race who are never expressly referred to by name in the series, but who are called "Seraphs" in the scripts for the episodes in which they appear. The Seraphs appear to be noncorporeal sentients, and claim rather ambiguously to have once been more traditionally mortal, but evolved to their present state.

In the episode "War of the Gods", the crew of the ship indicate they are the natural enemies of Count Iblis. Because it is strongly implied that Count Iblis may be the original basis for stories of Satan, this could imply the Ship Of Lights is meant to represent angels. However, this is not stated directly. On the other hand, the episode indicates very strongly that the Ship Of Lights is meant to be "good" and Iblis is meant to be "evil".

In Galactica 1980's last episode The Return of Starbuck the character of Dr. Zee is revealed to have been born to Starbuck and an inhabitant of the Ship of Lights. While the series was cancelled before it could be shot a script was written where it is revealed that Starbuck had in fact joined the Seraphs.

External links

* [http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Ship_of_Lights Ship of Lights] at the Battlestar Wiki.