The Colonial Battlestar is one of the crowing technical achievements of the greater human race, encorporating all the elements of a fully-fit destroyer with a starfighter carrier capacity almost equal to that of a TCS Midway-class vessel's.
Battlestars utilize engine and powerplant configurations which take something of a departure from conventional design techniques at several fundemental levels. Most notably, a Battlestar accesses faster-than-light travel through a warp-bubble effect rather than the use of a hyperspace velocity motivator--while the effects to the naked eye appear similar, this makes a Battlestar much harder to track for a destination, and also actually allows the Battlestar to extend its warp bubble over other objects or ships, allowing it to carry these obects or vessels along into lightspeed.
A Battlestar bases four full wings of the Colonials' Viper omnifighters. By using special pressure launching bays which run down the side of its two hanger pylons, a Battlestar can launch its entire compliment of fighters in less than half the time it would take a Mon Calimari cruiser to scramble its wings. Fighter recovery, however, is a more drawn-out process, though still quickened by the fact that Battlestars possess two independent oversized hanger decks.
The Colonials presently operate thirteen fully-operational Battlestars, one to represent each of the colonies they left behind as is traditional for their service. These vessels are the Atlantia (the flagship of the greater Colonial fleet and home of the Council of the Twelve), the Galactica (the military center of the greater fleet and the ship of Commander Adama, the head military officer attached to the Council), the Columbia, the Acropolis, the Rycon, the Bellerophon, the Pacifica, the Pegasus (the ship of Commander Kain, one of the Service's greatest officers and heros), the Cerberus, the Prometheus (home to Council Comp Baltar), the Olympia, the Solaris, and the Ullysia. Each Battlestar commands a fleet of habitation ships, housing the greater Colonial peoples during their pilgrimage.