Battlestar Augustus

Augustus was a Centurion-class Battlestar and at one time one of the most advanced military ships in the Colonial Fleet. Along with the Battlestar Galactica and the Pegasus was one of the Colonial military vessels to survive the Fall of the Twelve Colonies, serving under the command of Commander Mason Finch.

Fall of the Twelve Colonies
Once a glorious warship, the Battlestar Augustus sat in the surplus yard, being stripped of parts and equipment for almost 20 years before the Cylon attack. The ship, at that time, had been stripped of most critical components and was mostly an empty shell with an FTL drive that barely functioned inside. Because of the stripped-down state, it was immune to the Cylon hack of the computer systems because it never had the updated Command Navigation Program, the Augustus only had rudimentary computer systems at the time. Yet this was enough to spool up the FTL drive and launch.

It would dock at an old fleet repair yard on the outskirts of the 12 colonies, where it managed to get the majority of ships functions back online using scavenged parts from the repair yard and a number of ships docked there, now long forgotten. The process would take almost a full month of round the clock shifts to get the ship functioning, but the reward was a Battlestar ready for action.

It would be during this time that a number of damaged ships, both military and civilian, met up with the Augustus at the repair yards. Due to the damaged state of most of the ships, a number of them were used in the project to bring the Augustus back online. In the end, because nearly every ship that joined them lacked an FTL drive, the crews of all of them were transferred to the Augustus to bolster its low crew numbers. Because even with the additional personnel provided by the other ships a complete military crew compliment was impossible a number of civilians were recruited to fill in vital positions on the Augustus based on their qualifications for the job.

Viper Complement
As luck would have it, the Augustus had a number of the outdated Viper Mk IV onboard being stored in a decommissioned state. They were quickly brought back to functionality and ready for usage in battle. Less maneuverable than the Mk. VII or VI and less armored than the Mk. V, the Mk IV was a ship of its era and not truly up to the standard of the era, but there were no other options. Though there were very few trained to handle the Mk. IV anymore, the technology was standard enough that the learning curve was not insurmountable.

FTL Drive
The Augustus's FTL drive was built shortly after the First Cylon War based off of technology available. It was less robust than some that had come before it, but it was capable of a number of rapid jumps exceeding even older Battlestar models with minimum cooldown periods between the jumps. However, due to its long period of disuse and improvised control system, the drive was far from fully functional.