I don’t want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I wanna, I wanna smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly because I have to, I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I wanna reach out with something other than these prehensile paws and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine. And I could know much more.
Why it is hard sci-fi
The 2004 reboot is the procedural standard for fleet-on-the-run space opera. The Galactica has no inertial dampers in its dogfights and the Vipers tumble in vacuum as ballistic objects. The fleet manages fuel, water, and morale as enumerated resources. Cylons are biological and indistinguishable from humans without a blood test. The shows political and military protocols are tracked across seasons with continuity.
Science inside it
Newtonian dogfighting, FTL by jump rather than warp, biological androids with hidden-identity diagnostic problems, and a fleet logistics model that treats every resource as finite. The show also engages, more loosely, with prophecy and theology, which is its softest layer and is contained inside a hard frame.