Battlestar Cerberus (D5)

(This article refers to the Battlestar Cerberus mentioned in the Battlestar Hermes series of Fan Fiction on FanFiction.net. It is  not canon  and does not refer to any other Battlestar by that name.)

The Cerberus was unlike any other Battlestar in the Colonial Fleet. It was one of the original twelve Columbia-class Battlestars built during the Cylon War and saw action during that bitter conflict. It survived the war and continued to serve in the Colonial Fleet for another thirty years after which it was decided to withdraw the vessel. It was taken to Sagittaron where it was kept on the Active Reserve list for another five years before it was to be broken up for scrap.

History
A change in military thinking saved it from this fate. Thirteen years before The Fall of the Colonies a proposal was made to the lawmakers on Libran to fund a ship operated by both the military and the various civilian law enforcement agencies throughout the Twelve Worlds. The ship would act as an independent mobile police force and would be equipped with state-of-the-art forensic laboratory equipment for investigations in the field. Its primary duties would be to curtail the efforts of smuggling and pirate rings throughout the system but it would also be on hand to assist aid agencies in time of major emergencies such as the Aquarian Tsunami. To keep the military happy the ship would become part of the main Colonial Fleet in times of war.

In the interests of keeping development costs down it was decided to convert an existing design to serve this purpose. The Cerberus was chosen for this task and it immediately went into the shipyards at Scorpia for a rebuild the likes of which had never before been attempted. To help make room for the additional laboratories and medical facilities the FTL system was upgraded to allow it to make an FTL jump without the need to retract the Flight Pods. This freed up the chasm in the hull where normally these pods would retract into and allowed them to be 'filled out' therefore dramatically increasing internal volume.

The work took five years to complete and heralded a new age in the Colonial Fleet. The 'new' Cerberus had a crew of three thousand but only half of that were military personnel and were generally concentrated around operating the ship itself. The air wing consisted of the standard Raptors and initially Viper MkVIs but these soon gave way to the newer Viper Mk.VIIs. Whenever there was a major incident in the Colonies it was often the Cerberus that was the first to respond bringing with it the vast array of sophisticated equipment it possessed. The project was an overwhelming success.