Gunstar Vigilant
The Gunstar Vigliant is a Guardian Class Gunstar. It is commanded by Colonel Marco Hall and had a crew compliment of 500. It has a launch bay which houses four Raptors and a single Shuttle as its standard compliment. Other officers and crew worth noting, are the Executive Officer- Major Laura Black, the Ops Officer- Lt. Gregory Benedict and the DRADIS Officer- Lt. Frances "Mac" McGovern.
Operation Outreach[]
18 months before the Cylon attack, the Vigilant was assigned, along with the Gunstar Sentinel, to escort the Battlestar Prometheus during it search for the Thirteenth Tribe and the planet Earth.
It later engaged the Terran Alliance during the attack on Prometheus. It escaped capture with the Sentinel, and was heavily involved in recapturing the Prometheusand rescuing her crew.
Operation Celestial[]
Faced with the need to replenish supplies and parts which could not be easily fabricated, Admiral Turner began Operation Salvage; which required clandestine efforts to infilitrate former Colonial space, identify usable parts or ships for salvage, and then recover and return them to the colony of Copernicus. The biggest and by far the most dangerous of these missions was code named "Operation Celestial". The Battlestar Celestial had been severly damaged at the Battle of the Veil, when a Cylon missile dentonated inside her port side flight pod, completely destroying the pod and nearly taking the Celestial with it.
The Vigilant was charged with leading the mission to recover the intact port side flight pod of a sister ship of the Celestial, the Battlestar Icaris, which had been destroyed over Leonis during The Fall of the Colonies. In order to help accomplish its mission, the Vigilant's Raptor crews were supplemented and her lone Shuttle was off-loaded and replaced by a compliment of two (2) Mark VIII Stealth Vipers. Additionally, the Vigilant received an upgrade of its GSF and ECM suites, with the GSF being further modified to extend and envelope the Colonial Fleet Flat-top Danaus. The Vigilant was to escort the Danaus under the protection of the Vigilant's GSF field, recover the flight pod of the Icaris and return to Copernicus.
During this mission, the Vigilant was boarded by Cylons who managed to implant a Cylon virus. This virus, known as the Cylon Retrovirus, was based on Organic Resin which had been enhanced and modified to carry the virus and emulate conditions of a Cylon Basestar. Implanted in the starboard GSF/ECM array of the Vigilant, the virus sole purpose was to emit an encrypted signal using the arrray while it was in use, which would allow the Cylons to track the Colonials back to the Colony of Copernicus.