Call the ball.
Battlestar Galactica ep. 1.04, “Act of Contrition???: A big, juicy, tonsil-tickling kiss to Top Gun.
Evidence: pen-twirling in flight school; flat-spin ejection; aircraft carrier landings; “never leave your wingman” (changed to “never leave your leader” in a token attempt to avoid accusations of plagiarism).
Update: Uh, so, I wrote some more.
I can keep talking about BSG, if you want. The thing I really love about it—and I was sharing this with Amerikanerin, who’s also kind of into the show (sorry if I outed you!)—is its realism. It’s certainly not realistic in a space-physics kind of sense; people who get their Wookiee bandoliers in a bunch over that kind of stuff really ruin if for me. The new Battlestar Galactica series is instead realismic, like an Eakins painting: It is so sharply in focus that you feel you could reach out and touch it.
I liken the show to the B-movie adaptation of the video game Wing Commander in this respect. It’s probably technically referred to as “hard SF???, in the sense that it’s in outer space and has laser cannons and faster-than-light travel and all that. But the hard-sci-fi geekery kind of goes out the window. Or, more accurately, it is the window: It’s set dressing, a backdrop, a silent actor. In science fiction like WC and BSG, the outer-space, galaxy-far-far-away setting could easily be swapped out for the-bottom-of-the-ocean. Wing Commander is just a submarine movie with vacuum instead of water (and Hercule Poirot at the con).
Apparently I’m not the only person to make the connection. From the BSG weblog, authored by series creator (well, re-creator) Ronald Moore (of Carnivàle, among other things):
“Wing Commander” is frequently mentioned to me as a possible influence on the show, but I’ve never actually seen it. While it’s possible that other members of the production team were influenced by it, it wasn’t something that figured into my thinking. My own design influences were things like “Das Boot” “Blade Runner” “Alien/Aliens” and a stack of documentaries on the modern and history US and Royal Navies.
There you go. A classic men-in-a-metal-tube flick, and three great hard-SF films which, at their cores, happen to have very little to do with science fiction.