On the Sci-fi Channel Battlestar Board, Ron D. Moore stopped by with some interesting notes, if anyone is still interested.
A couple of things:
There was a point in the development process where we discussed the idea of the Galactica not being destroyed, but having somehow landed on the surface more or less intact, but unable to ever get into orbit again (the particulars here were never worked out, so don't ask how she made it down without being torn apart). We talked about them basically abandoning the ship and moving out into the world. Cut to the present-day in Central America where there are these enormous mysterious mounds that archeologists have not been able to understand (it may have been South America, I can't recall the exact location, but these mounds really do exist). Someone is doing a new kind of survey of the mounds with some kind of ground-penetrating radar or something and lo and behold, we see the outlines of the Galactica still buried under the surface.
It was an intriguing idea and we bandied about for a while, but ultimately rejected it as a little too cute
AND
The example we talked about most frequently in the writers' room was that of Cortez burning his ships when he got to the New World as a way of making sure his men had no choice but to go forward and wouldn't be tempted to change their minds or go back. (This isn't an area of history that I pretend to have a great knowledge of, so I can't say with any certainty that this is anything more than legend.) We liked the idea that Adama would do something similar here, putting the Colonists in a position that they had to go forward, not back and that they would have to embrace their new world without having other options at hand.
AND
We talked quite a bit about the Christian mythos and how the story of Kara Thrace would track with it. Kara did literally die -- Baltar rationally proves that -- and she is literally resurrected. He talks about the implications of that in ep 20 and how it held out hope to people for some sort of existence that transcended death.
Some other things at this link if you're interested:
http://forums.scifi.com/index.php?sh...8&st=0&start=0
Cowperson