The following report contains MODERATE SPOILERS for the "Battlestar Galactica" series.

What's it like doing just 13 episodes of a show, instead of the standard two dozen?

Producer Ronald D. Moore got a taste of that during his single season of work with HBO's "Carnivale," and now he's experiencing it yet again with "Battlestar Galactica."

The 1970s remake currently is airing on Britain's Sky One and coming in January to the Sci-Fi Channel in the United States. Moore -- best known for his work on as a writer and producer for "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" -- recently told SFX Magazine that he wouldn't have it any other way.

"We did 26 a year on Star Trek, and that was very hard and exhausting," he said. "The last quarter of the season was just a blur as you're desperately trying to finish. Doing 13, you can really focus and concentrate on the storylines, you can pay more attention to each episode, you can make them all work. It's much easier on the production side of it."

British fans have had a chance to see the first two episodes of the new series, and some have talked about how references to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, somehow make their way into the series in regards to the nuclear destruction of the 12 colonies by the Cylons. Moore said these references were no accident.

"When I was considering this project, I went back and rewatched the original pilot," Moore said. "That was about the destruction of civilization and shock, and you can't watch something like that after Sept. 11 and not think about it. So I knew that the audience was going to bring that to the table, and I deliberately decided to invoke a lot of those memories and play them realistically, and to remember how people reacted that I was around, and play it as real as possible, because we've all been through something like that."

While some might consider taking a more sensitive route when it came to parallels to such a tragedy, Moore said that doing so here would jeopardize the message being conveyed in the storytelling.

"It was important that the show be truthful to that, and not gloss over it, or make it pretty, but play it for the traumatic event it was," he said.

Doing "Battlestar Galactica" has been a welcome change from his past projects, including "Carnivale" and The WB's "Roswell." But doing the project, he said, reminds him more of what he would've liked to have seen in future incarnations of Star Trek -- something that was virtually ignored since the breakout success of "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

"By the time I left Star Trek (in 1999), I felt it had become a bit of a fossil," Moore said. "It wasn't really changing or progressing or trying to do something new. I felt it had sort of got stuck in a rut. What worked in the mid-'80s was becoming untenable in the '90s. 'Battlestar Galactica' was my opportunity to really push a lot of things forward and try to find a different style of storytelling, a different style of shooting it, different characterization. Just to try something different in sci-fi, instead of what Star Trek had done for 30 years. Make it something different. Make it real."

However, the mood and ideas of "Galactica" were employed to an extent on "Deep Space Nine," Moore said, but now to a point of really trying to create realism in a science-fiction universe.

"There's continuity on things," he said. "People get injured, and injuries last. The world itself is more textured as the series goes on. It's a lot of things that we were doing on 'Deep Space Nine,' but more so.

"There's enough drama to play with a fleet that's running out of fuel, that's running out of food, you know, and has all the remnants of human civilization -- there's only 50,000 of them and the Cylons are still chasing them, and the president is a woman who's never held the position before. I mean, there's plenty of drama and scary things, and you just don't need to go off to the casino planet."

What can fans expect through the first season of the show, which pulled in more than 750,000 viewers in its opening week on Britain's Sky One?

"There's an overall arc to the entire season, to the entire 13 episodes, and we learn more about the Cylons, their religion, the sense of a larger plan at work in a religious sense from both the Cylon perspective and the Colonial perspective," Moore said. "There's a lot more of the Colonial mythology and backstory about where they came from and where they're going."