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Battlestar Galactica 2004 Continuity
Battlestar Galactica 2004, Caprica and Blood & Chrome

The Command Navigation Program (abbreviated CNP) is an operating system designed for use among Colonial space-faring vessels, both civilian and military. It was primarily developed by Dr. Gaius Baltar, a leading scientist and computer expert. Installed in the central computers of Vipers and Raptors and in the navigation computers of almost all battlestars as well as many civilian vessels, the CNP is in widespread use at the time of the Cylon attacks.

History[]

As part of the Cylon plot to destroy the colonies, a Number Six, later known as "Caprica Six", was assigned to seduce Dr. Baltar and gain his confidence as an unofficial assistant. Over the next two years, she heavily modified Baltar's code to be more efficient, claiming later to have rewritten half the algorithms. In the final version of CNP, a line of code was added to enable backdoor hacking from an unauthorised source. With CNP intended to be universal, the Cylons planned to infect every vessel in the Colonial Fleet from Battlestars to Vipers with a virus through this backdoor access.[1]

In the Fall of the Twelve Colonies, the CNP backdoor was exploited heavily, and allowed for the near-total elimination of the Colonial Fleet within a matter of hours, with some thirty Battlestars destroyed in the first few minutes alone.[2] Though a number of ships were able to report systems-wide "system failures" before their destruction,[2][3] the counter-offensive launched by Admiral Nagala's Atlantia failed to consider a connection between CNP and the failings, and was destroyed.[2] The exploit proved a surprise to the Cylons who, while expecting victory, did not project their success to be so fast and cost-less.[4] After the first two days, the Colonial Fleet was limited to just two ships: Galactica, which was preparing for decommission and thus CNP was not installed on,[1] and Pegasus which had its server down pending a retrofit.[5] Both escaped the Cylons and abandoned the Cyrannus Star System, never to return. In the case of Pegasus, CNP was quickly determined to be the cause of the failures in the fleet and the backdoor line removed.[1] In the case of Galactica, CNP was eventually installed to help with a jump plotting and was immediately shut down to prevent a Cylon virus entering the computer systems.[6][7]

Sources[]

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 Battlestar Galactica: Razor.
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries, Night 1.
  3. Battlestar Galactica: The Plan.
  4. Battlestar Galactica, episode: "Downloaded".
  5. Battlestar Galactica, episode: "Pegasus".
  6. Battlestar Galactica, episode: "Scattered".
  7. Battlestar Galactica, episode: "Flight of the Phoenix".
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