Why Warship Classes Have Never Made Sense
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- Опубліковано 6 чер 2023
- Spacedock delves into the historically confusing topic of warship classifications.
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I still can’t believe they bring space battleship Yamato so much yet refuse to make more ship breakdowns on the franchise
sci-fi dreadnoughts; they’re only reasonable purpose is to mount more powerful weapons, which will ultimately be too big and slow to be effective. And some are so large that their size legitimately outranges their weapon’s complement. I wish that was a joke.
No, I actually like the term dreadnought because it makes sense when the Dreadnoughts and Super Dreadnoughts were first created and built there were no aircraft carriers. They were the largest most heavily, armed and armored warships in the world so having that name for certain kinds of space warships that are the biggest, toughest, most heavily armed space warships makes sense.
I got to thinking about the broader Transformers franchise and how you can have a tiny little thing like a Piranha Jet or a gigantic thing with a hyperdrive and both would be fighters... and the largest Hyperspace/transwarp capable vessels are described more by their alternative modes.
Transformers also have ships of their own and sometimes those Transform too.
I think trying to cram it into sci fi in general gives me a headache.
There is some nice designs though I count the Decepticon Targetmasters as some of my favorite starfighter designs from any franchise, Trigger happy being my overall favorite though Misfire and Slugslinger are also pretty spiffy too.
You should cover Unicron sometimes he's "technically" a space going vessels (well a Planet, but same difference),
War Planets is a very interesting franchise too if you fell like looking at that i'd put that in the same camp as Space Above and Beyond in that it's often over looked but it's actually really good.
@@TheRezro i haven't even research but the defiant class? is that a destroyer? or a light cruiser?
The mess isn't because no-one could be bothered making a proper system, it's because everyone tried making a proper system, and they're all different
That’s exactly it.
XKCD comic, "How standards proliferate"
Scenario: There are 16 competing standards
Bob: There are too many standards, we need one system that just covers everything
Alice: Good Idea!
There are now 17 competing standards.
Same reason there are so many coding languages out there.
And everyone wants _their_ standard to be the right one, so nobody ever cedes ground. Classic humans.
The best thing about setting a standard for your stuff is that there are so many to choose from.
imo "Dreadnought" in scifi became taken at face value - fear nothing. It's any ship so large, sturdy, and with such overwhelming armament that it can confidently engage entire fleets of lesser ships, and can outright win a one-on-one fight with any non-dreadnought ship.
It's just too cool of a word to have it constrained to a a subtype of Battleship.
Dreadnought is also the name of a type of "exo armor" used in the Warhammer 40k so
Ignoring the fact that the irl dreadnaught was actually lightly armoured and designed to keep away from anything it couldnt kill.
@@ulforcemegamon3094 Ok and?
@@brentonherbert7775 Not true; you're thinking of HMS Invincible, first of the battlecruisers. Dreadnaught was a battleship - heavily armored and while ridiculously fast when compared to pre-dreadnaughts (another classification that suddenly appeared on the spot!) it wasn't that fast overall and was still intended to slug it out broadside to broadside with other battleships.
However "can kill anything faster than it, faster than anything that can kill it" is the literal original definition of a battlecruiser. Which would have turned out fine if they had used them as intended: as cruisers. But people in charge just saw big guns, wanted more big guns in the battleline, put battlecruisers in the battleline, and then Jutland happened and "battlecruiser" became a dirty word.
@@brentonherbert7775 Dreadnought (1906) had more armour than preceding RN battleships, comparable armour to the Lord Nelsons that were being built at the same time, and more than Satsuma (which was originally going to be an "all big gun" ship, but Japan couldn't afford enough 12-inch guns; if they could, then we'd probably be calling this type of ship Satsumas, instead of Dreadnoughts).
You may be thinking of the Invincibles, which had comparable armour to contemporary armoured cruisers (e.g. the Minotaurs, Warriors, and Duke of Edinburghs).
A possible reason the term Dreadnaught means "oversized Battleship" may come from the real world's ship's historical significance; it was the first "all big gun" Battleship, and began the trend for making them progressively larger then those that came before. This is why Battleships are often categorized as pre- or post- Dreadnaught in real life.
HMS Dreadnought didn't start the trend of making larger and larger battleships. HMS Dreadnought was 18000 tons displacement. The Lord Nelson class that preceded it was 15000 tons and only a few years prior battleships were 12-13000 tons. It's far from the only time where a clear "before-and-after" line could be drawn. The Fubuki class had a similar effect on destroyer design and the Invincible class that would become known as the first battlecruiser class started out as an idea for a "dreadnought armored cruiser". When battleships jumped to 13.5"/14" guns those were called superdreadnoughts for a bit but there wasn't a similar distinction made when battleships jumped to 15/16" guns.
Had HMS Dreadnought had a less appropriate and evocative name (say, HMS Bellerophon, the next Royal Navy battleship built) or had Satsuma or USS South Carolina been completed first, people may not have drawn such a clear line. They still would have recognized that the newer all-big-gun battleships had a clear and decisive advantage over older ones and thus the older ones were only good for second line duty, much like older destroyers after the introduction of the Fubuki class. The only other time that a whole type or subtype has been named after a specific ship was the monitor as USS Monitor had a particularly appropriate name for its role.
Sabaton Dreadnought has made me love the name and perfectly encapsulates the emotion you are meant to feel when you see one. For stories especially emotion plays arguably a more important role then practicality anyway, although that depends on the setting
@@lunatickoala HMS Dreadnought had three major advances, all at the same time: all-big-guns meant her fire was more accurate; bigger guns than anything else afloat (albeit, only very briefly) meant her more accurate fire was longer-ranged; and steam turbines which meant that she was faster than anything else afloat (again, only briefly) meant she could control the range. One on one, HMS Dreadnought could have killed anything else that existed at the moment she was launched. So it really is a very clear line.
And sure, the name makes it much easier to see that line - but the name was deliberately chosen by Jackie Fisher to emphasise the technical revolution she represented. Though I grant you, had South Carolina made it into the water first, Sci-Fi would probably not be full of massive "carolinas" pounding away on each other.
And, yes, I'm aware that Satsuma and USS South Carolina were also incorporating this revolution, and doing it better. "Dreadnought" is very much a marketing/prestige exercise all the way around. But it's also worth acknowledging that the marketing exercise *worked*.
(I have read way, way more about HMS Dreadnought than I ever wanted to, because in a very real way the "dreadnought crisis" created by her deployment is why Canada had an independent navy prior to the Statute of Westminister, and that was a topic of a major paper I wrote as part of my BA (History). I say all this not to brag, but to establish some level of credibility.)
i'd bet it from the name itself, "Dreadnought" roughly meant fearless. the class was meant to bring "fear" to the opposing side while stand firm against all odds. its pretty fitting for a super-sized battleship in sci-fi settings.
@@bagustesa It specifically means "Fear Nothing" Dread=Fear Nought=Nothing
Enemies lived in fear and called their ships The 20 minuters, after how long they would expect to survive against a dreadnought
I heard somewhere HMS Dreadnought was the only RN ship to not have a motto, beacuse its name was its motto, although that could be bunkem
And don't forget that in the Royal Navy during the Age of Sail, a ship's classification would change depending on the rank of the commanding officer. A ship with two masts is a brig, but a brig isn't a commander's command, so if a commander was appointed to command a two-masted ship, it was automatically reclassified as a sloop-of-war.
Well, that was stupid. I could understand a parallel classification system to help with organization for who is in command of what ship and what squadrons, but changing the class of ship from the _type_ of ship it is to a different type is just moronic. I imagine that a lot of ships were blown to Hell or were massively overpowered (and therefore wasted) on many assignments due to this.
Nice.
Just put a commander on every two-master and you've got yourself a whole bunch of sloops of war.
The XKCD comes to mind:
There are 14 standards!? We need one unified standard!
There are now 15 standards.
Ha! I posted that as a response to an earlier comment.
The unified standard fall short and makes amendments, there are now 18 standards, the obsolete one people refuse to abandon, the draft everyone likes more and has adopted, the new version no one likes, and a modified version one person made that is popular in the community everyone talks about online but no one actually uses.
There were 12 Standards
USS's Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Arizona, New Mexico, Mississippi, Idaho, Tennessee, California, Colorado, Maryland, West Virginia.
Though, imho the 16" Standards (Colorado, Maryland and West Virginia) should be considered their own separate class.
This isn't really the same thing at all. Those 15 different standards are classifying everything in their own way, whilst we are just talking about one classification system that has many categories.
Your analogy would make more sense if someone decided to make an entirely new classification system for warships, which isn't what is going on; we are operating in one classification system
@@gudmundursteinarI see what you did there.
Ships are built to fulfill their purpose first, and are wedged into categories later. Practical engineering should always supercede arbitrary classification systems.
Not the treaty ships... the classes were specified first
@@dhanu_4539 And that turned out poorly.
@@jtjames79 yes but you have to admit that it made things interesting.. everyone was trying various tricks to get around the restrictions. We wouldn't get the Nelson class or the Missouri or the Yamamoto if not for it
@@dhanu_4539 Agreed, in a drama things turning out poorly is often a good thing.
Yes, but what if pew pew laser beams supercede practical engineering?
Prefixes as in Fast Battleships, light/heavy/big Cruisers, escort Carrier, etc. were actually used to mark specific shiptypes without giving them a new name.
I always thought that "fast" battleships are called that to distinguish them from old/pre-WWII battleships, because battleships built during that time were generally fast for their ship class I guess.
@@regulate.artificer_g23.mdctlsk That holds true mostly, however those designs most often times compromised somewhat on protection (not to the extend of a battlecruiser) Examples are the newer US battleships. On the other hand, Bismarck and Yamato definetly did not and still were very fast, however in their respective countries, both were just classified as battleships, while the Japanese actually re-classified the WW1 era Kongo Class Battlecruisers as fast Battleships in the 1940s. So depending on what you wanna express, the Term Fast Battleship can fill any point between Battlecruiser and Battleship.
@@kaltenstein7718 And battlecruiser is already a mix between cruiser and battleship.
Original meaning of "Dreadnought" is something along the lines "fears of no one". This is surely fitting for the Star Wars Dreadnought class ships.
Unless you're swarmed by dozen fish-crewed gloryfied AMCs and one light interceptor slips by your AA...
@@antonisauren8998 I love starwars but I will always say that the only reason the empire ever lost is because the writer needed them to and the fact that the ship designers where stated to focus more on a threat outsite of the startwars bubble than the resistance that just came out of nowhere
@@harrowshadow Yuuzhan Vong, baybee! Discredited, but still neat.
@@antonisauren8998 Dang it, you had to remind us of when that happened. Why is it that every time we try to have a cool warship, something like that happens?
The HMS Dreadnought became a class of ships because it rendered all previous warships near obsolete. So if there's a Sci-fi ship that outclasses everything it goes against, that could be called a dreadnought. A ship without fear. Good for narrative shifts when it fights a space-iceburg.
Exactly, and when you mass produce them, they become battleships after you build something bigger as a flag. Most people take battleship as something big with a lot of guns and bigger than that is dreadnought.
Would also be fun to use the name of a fictional ship in your setting as the namesake of a completely new type of ship as an homage to the Dreadnought.
Like say you have a Ship "A" that's so revolutionary that like the real life Dreadnought people start calling ships based on it an "A" ship.
Nice
But it only made older ships obsolete because new metallurgy, energy storage, optics (and math), and weapon design has pushed out the potential engagement distance, thus making the "big guns" and long-range torpedoes possible. It is a product of the times.
this is a very secondary remark but: in french there is no real term for "battleship", instead the term used is "cuirassé" which is the french TL for dreadnought. so there's also linguistics issues ahah...and dreadnought/cuirassé honestly sounds more metal sooooooo yeah no i'm gonna just use that in my sci fi, its in speihss and the future it doesnt have to follow current, already wobbly, ship classification : P
The "destroyer" story is about shifting specifications. Originally, when they were introduced back in the late 19th century, they were specifically to counter the torpedo-boat menace that everyone was worried was going to wipe out the very expensive battleships, so they were just a bit bigger than torpedo boats, like three hundred tons, and called "torpedo boat destroyers".
The threat of torpedo-boats turned out to be exaggerated, but the navies of the world found that these small, fast, lightly armed "torpedo-boat destroyers" were useful for other purposes, such as scouting ahead of the main fleet, patrolling the perimeter of the fleet, escorting civilian ships, and so on; so they were kept around for that, but gradually increased in displacement. By World War I, they took on anti-submarine duties, lost the first part of their type name - becoming just "destroyers" - and had gained weight to around a thousand tons.
By World War II, destroyers had nearly doubled their WWI weight, and through the war picked up sonar, radar, and more anti-aircraft guns, prompting a post-war increase in size to around double their WWII size, around 4000 tons, to accommodate all the new gear they had to have now, including the first generation of guided weapons.
By the end of the Vietnam War, US destroyers were around 8000 tons, with more powerful radar and sonar systems, more weapons, and a helicopter to extend their anti-submarine range. They stayed at this size through to the Nineties, but then the _Zumwalt_ class was designed to replace that generation, which had a displacement of around 15,000 tons. At this point, the US destroyer was now _bigger_ than the US _Ticonderoga_ cruiser class of around 10,000 tons. And the replacement for the unsuccessful _Zumwalt_ destroyers (only three were built), is the _DDG(X),_ which will be around 13,500 tons, and still bigger than the current generation of cruisers.
Not so much chaos, as mission creep and steady growth.
'Destroyers' have pretty much become the default non-capital ship surface unit.
They were the smallest ships of a battle fleet, and the cheapest, so also the most numerous.
During WW2 they were also some the most flexible as you pointed out, big enough to be upgraded with modern sensors, but still much cheaper than even light cruisers. Frigates made a return as even smaller,cheaper ships in WW2 as well, but not as battle fleet ships, instead as more specific role types for anti-submarine,convoy escort, etc, and were generally much slower and less capable than even WW1 era destroyers but freed the destroyers up to stick with the main fleet.
After WW2, the proliferation of missiles and torpedoes as the primary anti-ship weapons, making armor and guns pretty much irrelevant outside of actual battleships, made the Destroyer the most obvious class to focus on as they were already set up for torpedoes and anti air roles, had all the modern sensors, were generally big and fast enough to be suitable for the foreseeable future, and were already the most numerous and cheapest to keep running.
Cruiser stuck around because early anti ship missiles were huge, but as tech progressed and the missiles and launchers got smaller, and the destroyers got bigger, the cruisers disappeared and destroyers took over the job.
Now destroyers are pretty much the default non-carrier surface unit, with frigates as again more task specific supplements for escort and anti-sub work.
Of course the big irony that the Destroyers themselves become very potent torpedo boats... and had sunk bigger ships that way.
Torpedo boat destroyers very swiftly themselves became torpedo boats, a d this was their primary duty. Distributed long range heavy anti ahip firopower. Anti submarine roles verse secondary, and only in a fleet role, general ASW patrol was handed to whatever the class below destroyer is called (corvette, frigate destroyer escort, sloop, sub chaser, its all the same), and anti air defence is usually the purview of a dedicated air defence cruiser.
Similarly independent operarion, such as shore support, long range maritime patrol or fleet scouting are also cruiser roles.
Modern "destroyer"s are 100% fleet cruisers, and mkdern "frigate"s are 100% destroyers. Cruisers seem to have mostly died out, and been replaced by mission crept destroyers.
In the end its all just political semantics to get the budget a given navy wants.
Actually, torpedo boat destroyers *were* the torpedo boats at first, just bigger and meant to travel with fleet. It is reflected in Russian and 20th century French maritime terminology where it is called an escadre (squadron) torpedo boat; also first examples, built before the name of "destroyer" was made, were called torpedo gunboats
Mass Effect's system of classification is still one of my favorites, because the overall size of ships are directly tied to how big of an Element Zero drive core you can make for a ship. The costs to build bigger Eezo cores is the biggest limiting factor that isn't directly tied to Treaties, making Star Wars-level Super Star Destroyers financially infeasible in the Mass Effect universe.
That and the ships in Mass Effect almost reflect how they are used by a wet navy. They even state in the lore that humanity joining caused a lot of military problems because even the Turians were caught off guard by the concept of an Aircraft Carrier, something that was truly human in concept.
@@Seriona1 Of course, the real problem with That, is that the carrier doesn't make a scrap of sense in space warfare, because the fighter/bomber imediately becomes indistinguishable from a missile or a corvette (or bigger!), depending on the specifics of the setting's technology, if it doesn't just get abondoned entirely due to being utterly useless in space warfare.
@@laurencefraser except it isn't useless. In mass effect specifically, the normandy itself is a tiny ship, it does well in every regard as a fighter in air. So having fighters or even boarding ships seems pretty reasonable.
@@tarektechmarine8209 Are you saying that there are carriers that carry entire wings of Normandy like vessels?
@@laurencefraser spend a 100 mil on a dozen fighters > spending 100 mill for a single missile carrier, you can't beat the cost efficient of a si gle fighter launched carrying nuclear warheads
Let's not forget HMS Hood which was classified as a battlecruiser because it had battleship guns and was fast regardless of its battleship grade protection. Many consider it the first fast battleship
Battlecruiser is a far better descriptor for Hood than fast battleship in my opinion, as her implementation would have been far closed to that of a battlecruiser than say a Nelson class. Also she would have been classified as a fast battleship in any other navy, it’s just the Royal Navy’s classification of a battlecruiser is more lax than other navies.
@@jdog345 While I would agree that Battlecruiser is a Better descriptor for Hood it should be noted that quite a lot of ships of the Interwar period fell into this category such as: the Dunkerque class, the Scharnhorst class, and the up-armored Kongou class.
@@kcpatri yes absolutely agree, I actually think all three should be considered battlecruisers as well, hell I’d actually throw Bismarck in there as well.
There is also an argument that the Iowa-class fast battleship should properly be classed as battlecruisers, because they kept the armor of the preceding South Dakota class, but have more powerful guns and are faster.
Since the rule of thumb for armor was that battleships were proofed against their own guns, and battlecruisers weren't, and the Iowas aren't proofed against their own guns they should be called battlecruisers, and the real battleships would have been the Montanas had they ever been built.
@@MandoWookie While the Iowas did use slightly more powerful guns that does not mean much, in reality they had slightly longer barrels, going from 45 calibers to 50 calibers, and used the same shells as the previous classes of ships until you get into the cold war. Not to mention that that with the armor present from certain ranges it would be proofed against any enemy battleship minus Yamato.
I personally am not annoyed by the idea of dreadnoughts being massive battleships, since the name means "fear nothing", and I would hope that a massive battleship doesnt have much to fear. The name also just sounds threatening, so I think it fits fairly well. In my game, dreadnoughts are a subclass of battleships, intended to act sort of like mini space stations. While they have massive firepower, they are not meant to operate on their own and require other ships to support it.
There is one thing even a Dreadnought should fear: Its a damaged A-wing ramming into the bridge.
I think role is a little more important than size. Because size is relative. (Our super heavy dreadnought might be considered a patrol boat to an alien power.)
If a dreadnought fills the same role as a battle ship but better, then it just becomes the new battle ship.
Using dreadnoughts as a sort of base kinda works. I'd likely use the term command ship.
@@erikschaal4124 yeah my dreadnoughts are more of a cross between a command ship and a space station
@@builder396 Or in WWII, a torpedo dropped by a fabric skinned biplane :) Swordfish FTW!
Sabaton Dreadnought has made me love the name and perfectly encapsulates the emotion you are meant to feel when you see one. For stories especially emotion plays arguably a more important role then practicality anyway, although that depends on the setting
I remember being very confused when I learned Rocinante was a 'corvette-class frigate' because it seemed like such a ridiculous contradiction in terms. Later, it made more sense that Rocinante is a light frigate with heavy Martian frigates seen, and the lead ship of the class is called 'Corvette' as a kind of historical joke on the part of the Martian Navy.
Possibly disinformation - confusing people about the type of ship is helpful.
Also might be somewhat of a compromise in that some people wanted a corvette and some wanted a frigate and the compromise was a frigate called a corvette.
Corvettes in old classification was specifically an escort vessel.
@@Justanotherconsumer Is this some kind of "Battlecruiser" thing? I don't think people will be confused. I think people will just plainly find it very stupid. "Corvette class-Frigate?" Might as well make a "Star Destroyer-Frigate". Or a "Death Star spacedock".
@@SioxerNikita
Which classification?
During the Age of Sail, French corvettes were the equivalent of England/Britain's sloops-of-war and their roles were comparable; coastal patrol, message running and reconnaissance.
Steam corvettes were warships smaller than frigates but larger than steam gunboats and steam sloops. The British then officially dropped the term in 1877.
During WW2, the British resurrected the term to refer to the Flower-class anti-submarine escort; a ship half the size and weight of a Tribal-class destroyer. They were easy to build and excellent for coastal patrol but they were too small for ocean-going escort though they served the role admirably around Canada, Iceland and the British Isles. (Playing Silent Hunter 3, seeing a Flower corvette tossed about in heavy seas is enough to make you feel seasick) They were succeeded by the Castle-class, better suited for the open ocean.
Modern corvettes are basically smaller versions of bigger warships; varying in role from escort, sub-hunters, anti-air vessels, anti-ship vessels, littoral combat to mine laying. Some can even serve as ice breakers. They're basically general purpose small warships. Much as destroyers have become general purpose medium sized warships.
As I understand it, a -class is typically like so: A design for a ship is drawn up, built, and the name of the first one built is also the name of the class. For example: The Gerald R. Ford is a Gerald R. Ford class carrier (US Navy). Or the Admiral Flota Sovetskogo Soyuza Kuznetsov is a Kuznetsov-class carrier (USSR Navy). Or the Nagato is a Nagato-class battleship (Imperial Japan).
So, in the case of the "Corvette-class frigate" I assume the first ship of that class was - confusingly enough - named "Corvette". Or they broke with international, age-old naming conventions and just picked something they thought was cool (and dumb).
Destroyers are the weirdest IRL I think. They started as very small, very specialized vessels (torpedo boat hunters, later on submarine hunters) and all had the same shape: Very narrow, elongated with a raised bow.
Now they're basically cruisers and shaped like cruisers.
If Dreadnaught makes some people squirm, some settings (like Sins of Solar Empire and Stellaris) have Titans which can be even more ridiculous bridging the gap between "starship" and "deathstar". In some instance they are straight up the seat of power of a civilization.
Oh heck yeah! Love seeing a Sins reference! The titans are the game changers. Once you tech up and can also afford to build titans the game generally hinges around using your Titan and defending against enemy Titans. Sure do like Sins of a Solar Empire!
See, Titan I am arguably more fine with with because it's actually unique. It's describing an enormous ship with no clear parallel, whose scope is absurd beyond compare. It's a more creative descriptor than just slapping """Dreadnought""" on it. Titans, pre-Olympian gods. A fitting moniker for a ship which can stand up against a fleet on its own. Even without the mythological portion, Titanic, as an adjective, is descriptive of something large, or awe-inspiring.
@@TheHazelnoot yeah, and it's a good thing that titans are the only similarly massive ships in stellaris.
Except for the colossus.
The Culture has the GSV or Genral system Vehicles which are mobile space colonies that house Millions to Billions of and have with ship yards schools recreation and housing armed with weapons that make the death star look like a BB gun and controlled by a post singularity AI.
Imagine the space colonies in Gundam if they could do an FTL drive by and turn a star systems worth of planets to exotic mater and park inside the interior of a star without issues
@@bonogiamboni4830 or the Juggernaut...
There is a fun concept in writing for warships that you brought up in this:
- Most of the general audience looks at most warships as battleships, regardless if they are true battleships or not.
- Future small space navies don't really need much of a class nomenclature with political agenda promoting or changing the naming as well (as Spacedock mentioned).
- Aliens may or may not look at the class nomenclature the same as we do.
- The very concept of the misidentified class nomenclature can actually be written into a story universe as well (what I do with my own writings). For example, the battleships are actually looked at as heavy cruisers or guided missile cruisers in the military.
You can see similar mis-classifications with other military equipment, too. Any type of armored vehicle? It's a tank to the general audience. Anything that can fly and carry bombs? Probably a bomber. Any type of rifle? Must be an assault rifle.
If you aren't interested at least somewhat in military technology, you will get a lot of theses misidentifications by the general public and they don't really care too much about it either.
@@Schnittertm1 Absolutely.
Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series has a really good and consistent ship classification system, ranging from Destroyers up to Battleships, with the roles and classifications of each class very well defined. It even has a nod to the messiness of real world classifications, the protagonist remarks on some "Scout Battleships" in his fleet that seem to be a weird dead-end hybrid of Battlecruiser and Battleship that isn't very good at either role.
I LOVE the Lost Fleet series.
Also the Terran Privateer and Starships mage series by Glynn Stewart. They are all great and accurate sort of harder scifi books.
Lost Fleet is amazing. The only thing that bugs me with the ships is how tiny and "useless" light cruisers seem. But that's probably because you see everything from the perspective of a fleet fielding 20+ Battlecruisers and Battleships, so a few light cruisers ARE insignificant.
I love the Honor Harrington series because they have great system. It hasn't wavered throughout and has even gone thru slight shifts with technological improvements. The combat is intense and that's saying something for engagements that happen over light-minute distances.
@@derhauptmann2359 read his spin-off series "Lost Stars", it scratches that itch for a certain extent. It follows the events in Midway star system and its people, and IMO makes a good take on how "smaller" engagements look - because one rebel system cannot afford pumping battleships/battlecruisers just like that, they need to make a good use of their flotilia of smaller ships like HuKs, light cruisers and a couple of heavy cruisers as flagships.
They do acquire a pair of capital ships further during the events, but even then they only serve as centerpieces, still heavy supplemented with lighter combatants
@@Tetsujinhanmaa I love the series, but it's use of dreadnought and super-dreadnought as classes does bother me. They are just used as battleships tactically, forming the main line (or wall) of battle. It's just a fancy name for battleship. Super-dreadnought is even worse, because it is often used as just a bigger dreadnought class. So what comes after super-dreadnought? Super-duper-dreadnought?
A fun fact I learned from British Cruisers of the Victorian Era by Norman Friedman is that Victorian Britain considered frigates and corvettes to be cruisers, back when (1870s) the definition had to do with gun decks and literally cruising for long distances with self propulsion. Indeed, by early Victorian definitions all modern warships could be classified as cruisers, because they can go long distances under power. Definitions are always precise until they aren’t.
I think it makes the most sense for ships to be classified by role, instead of size. For example, a battleship would be a craft primarily dedicated to line battles, cruisers to fleet screening and reconnaissance, destroyers to fleet escort, frigates to anti-piracy, and Corvettes to coastal security.
That's more or less how the terms were applied historically. In particular, cruisers and battlecruisers were designed to go on long "cruises" away from the fleet for things like commerce raiding and colonial patrols, leading to the need for a balanced design since each ship has to essentially stand on its own. In fleet combat, the battleships were the primary heavy hitters, and were supported by destroyers whose job was to chase away anything that tried to come up and torpedo the battleships (sometimes including enemy destroyers).
The issue is that people mix terms from multiple periods willy nilly with no regard to use. The Age of Sail may use the same words, but the ships referred to are completely different by period. An Age of Sail Frigate was a cruiser. AoS frigates routinely operated alone to patrol, picket and project power. In other words they made long independent "cruises" ie they were cruisers. Some of my books on the subject have old writings that use the term when referring to frigates. Later the frigate disappeared and was replaced by cruisers (cruisers, armored cruisers, light cruisers, heavy cruisers and so one depending on the role) They were "cruisers" because that class of vessels tended to operate independently just like the old frigate did. Destroyers originally appeared with the full name of torpedoboat destroyer with a primary mission of escort and protection of it's charges from torpedoboats. After WW1 and through WW2 they kept piling on more mission tasking until the now called destroyer to the point that the destroyers effectiveness was diluted by too many roles. So they resurrected the term frigate for a similarly sized vessel that specialized in anti-submarine warfare. Over time the gun cruiser found it's effectiveness reduced with the advent of the missile and they are slowly disappearing while the destroyer has become a bigger and heavier vessel to the point it is actually larger than old heavy cruisers. Navies differ but the primary problem with most people trying to understand ship classification terminology is that they try to mash a 1000+ plus years of purpose and mission together. A 2000's corvette out masses and is far more heavily armed than a 1940's destroyer. A 1940 battleship dwarfs a 1900 dreadnought. IMO the major reason the terms are so messed up in many scifi franchises is they made no attempt to pick a specific historical period and select all their class names from that one period. They mix and match based on their unresearched opinion of "cool factor". One of the reasons I like David Weber's books that have space fleet actions is that he selected a specific and defined historical naval period and most importantly historical nation's naming conventions and sticks to them. So his books make sense. As much as I like Star Wars, it is a soup sandwich as far as naming conventions go. They went for "it sounds neato" rather than selecting plausible terms. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed Star Wars before the series ended in 2005. But they really didn't try to make a coherent nomenclature.
Cruisers can vary wildly in size, from 5k (Sendai-class) tons to almost 20k tons (prinz eugen), so the distinction between heavy and light is fairly useful even for roles, as heavy cruisers tend to be part of the battle line while light cruisers are screening.
I don't think there will be that many kinds of spaceships. Many argue against space fighters, but the same arguments applies to capital ships and other vessels as well. What's the role of destroyers when torpedo boats, submarines, and fighters don't exist? What about speed? Battleships are typically portrayed to be slow. But this isn't that much of a concern in space when delta-v and acceleration is all that matters. In that regard, if fuel costs are ignored, small ships have no advantage over large ships.
@@HeliosLegion Well, there are two big reasons as to why there is likely going to have ship classes in space as well.
First one is cost relative to the role of the ships. As example, creating massive spaceship to patrol your own space or to make reconnaissace is definitely less efficient than using smaller vessels. A larger ship, with a larger crew and more systems, will definitely have a higher maintenance cost too. We can generalize this principle to military duty as well. To get an anti-missile or fighter ship, you likely don't need a big ship. In fact, multiple small ships would likely give more coverage than a single large ship.
And secondly, mass still has an impact on the amount of energy needed to accelerate things in space, ie, the more massive a ship is, the more energy is needed to get the same acceleration as a smaller ships. So, the ship that can use more energy relative to its mass would accelerate faster. This is going to be a lot more viable for smaller ships: as they are smaller, losing them is less of an issue, and thus, more mass and energy can be diverted from defence and offensive systems towards propulsion. In turn, this means that smaller ship could move faster than big ones.
Fun Fact, confusion on types also applies to aircraft, example the F-117A Nighthawk which is actually a bomber and should be B-117A but due to treaties the US already had it's "quota" of bomber types so they just gave it a fighter designation.
Or as it's a pretty light bomber it kind of fits the Tri-service designation Attack category better, an A-117A if you like. But the USAF seems to view Attack as largely a USN designation, the USAF's A-10 not withstanding. And there's no way the USAF wants to risk implying their first stealth warplane is a USN platform .
Plus calling it a fighter is a bit of misdirection should enemies find out about it before it is revealed; and it probably helps lure Air Force pilots into the program (they don't find out the "fighter" has no air-to-air capability until they've already been read it; and at that point they're stuck )
The F vs. B designation has little to do with quotas and everything to do with attracting pilots. If you've never been around someone in the Air Force, you may not realize that anything with an "F" as the first letter attracts the best and brightest. Everything else is a distant second. This is neither fair nor right, but it is what it is. Fighter jockeys look down on everyone else, and bombers are seen as barely one step above cargo flights in their eyes.
It also helps get things through Congress sometimes. The F-111 was originally planned as a giant, heavy "fighter" back when people though long range, high speed, and all-missile armament was the future of air combat. They really tried to get the US Navy onboard to fly these behemoths off carriers. When that idea crashed and burned, they remade it as a bomber, but kept the "F" designation to pretend it was actually a fighter and avoid the "B" stigma.
You can argue the F-117 should've had an "A" or "B" designation since its entire mission was air-to-surface, but you can also argue the "F" was put there as disinformation back when it was a black project.
@@ThePrisoner881 well to be fair, long range missile based high speed combat is the standard of air to air combat now, though with stealth added in, so they weren't exactly wrong.
@@jonathansmith6050 A implies a tactical bomber that’s used in combined arms doctrine, the F-117 is definitely a strategic bomber (albeit a small one).
Don't forget the F-111 Aardvark, which despite having the "F" for fighter, was used for literally every EXCEPT air combat; strategic bombing, EW, CAS, etc
"Dreadnought" worked for mass effect because the name, like the ships themselves, were a call back to WW1, where ME space combat takes a lot of inspiration from. Mass Effect didn't just slap an outdated ship classification onto their ships because it sounded cool, unlike most sifi.
ME also has a clear definition of a dreadnaught, a ship built around a giant gun.
I'm not sure I understand the distinction.
I clearly remember mass effect throwing around things like Firgates, Cruisers, and carriers around too.
@@nobodyherepal3292 In many cases we don't see a large difference in many of he fleets, due to the fact outside of certain classes, the council species' governments had fairly standardized patters. For instance, my of humanity's ships were outwardly very similar with the primary discrepancy being in over all size rather than structural template. The Turians did much the same. The Asari were the only ones the really diverge from this, but still had very similar over all designs across their ship classes.
@@FMpimper I think cruisers also have spinal guns, dreadnoughts just have a bigger, more dramatic spinal gun.
It's worse for games like Space Engineers. We have people making blueprints 20000 blocks large, or more, which make it hard for the game to run being called destroyers or cruisers and then smaller ships battleships.
To even have them battle something you'd be hard pressed. So I make my own definitions based on size because of the game but something like 3000 blocks is a cruiser, 4000-5 battleships but battleships don't exist anymore.
For me it's like:
Large grid
7000 pcu is corvette
15000 pcu is frigate
22000 pcu is cruiser
40000 pcu is battleship
50000 pcu and higher is dreadnought
I like compound name building.
"Deca mother scout" could mean a ~10kt ship maintaining it's own fleet, intended for reconnaissance.
But it is harder to make it sound cool.
Why don’t battleships exist?
Yes, it´s really messed up... and the fact the performance of the game has made larger and larger ships reasonable over the years isn´t really helpfull for that to. About 6-7 years ago i build a whole family of ships, variants of the same 150-meter designs. Relatively small Battlestars, and Cruiser-Variants without the hangars, even an Auxiliar-Variant with fuel tanks for Fleet replenishment. Back then, because of Game-performance and PC-performance, i could spawn only about 6 of those vessels in close proximity before the performance got pretty messed up. But today: I can spawn about 50 of those vessels before i really loose game performance. What i considered to be my serial-production-ships for the main battle-line back then, isn´t useable as more then a long range scout by today´s standard. I wasn´t on public servers pretty often but what i have seen on some of those is just crazy: What i build on my worlds has the thought of mass-production in mind, but what is build on some servers today, are just super large ships that can hit the kilometer mark in some cases. Sorry: But i think i will stay in the 300 to 500-meter area for my creations. My former go-to vessels have been rebuild many times since then, upgrade with new Blocks, better building skills, newer weapon systems, but they still remain in the 100-150 meter range for that said family and about 300-350 for my flagship-type. I plan to build / rebuild an older design of mine to. A few years ago i have build a 400-meter Nova-class Battlestar from a BSG Fan-Fiction. I sadly lost that blueprint and now i am planning a new variant, but it will be 450 to 500 meters long, just because i need additional height to solve some problems i had with the first version. That will be my Flagship, but i already know that it won´t be a large ship in a few years, it won´t even be on a lot of servers we can see today, but that ship can be made in serial production and it will be definitely more functional then most of those super-large PVP-builds.
I classify ships based on what it's for. Destroyers do exactly that. They destroy stuff and leave. Battleships well... battle ships.
Great points! I really like the classification system Ian M. Banks made up for his Culture novels. Lables like "Limited Systems Vehicle", "General Contact Vehicle" "Rapid Offensive Unit" or "Superlifter" were a new take and quite self-explanatory.
Like to use cheap Lancer frigates and missile destroyers as my fast reaction fleet
Yes, this system is amazing!
Loved his classification system as well - seemed more appropriate to space combat.
But then they start reclassifying because of politics and a Rapid Offensive Unit becomes a Very Fast Picket so they can claim demilitarization. So not too unlike the ambiguity mentioned in the video. Also the classification changes based both on commanding entity (e.g. switching to Excentric) and governing body (different civilizations have their own classifications for comparable ships.
I love the idea of the "All Good Things" Enterprise-D being classified as a "trireme" because it has 3 nacelles. 😁
I really like this.
The thing about classes is that they exist for administrative convenience, and their meaning is always shifting as technology, doctrine and industry do.
So when the millions of officers have issues keeping track of what a frigate actually is today, imagine a single writer.
Edit: Dreadnoughts being very big, bigger than battleships, does make sense. Just, not 10 times bigger. HMS Dreadnought herself, was nearly double the tonnage of her predecessors.
But the HMS Dreadnaught was dwarfed by WWII battleships of the US Navy and the Imperial Navy of Nihon. Designations that work at one time, or for one war, might be completely different or outdated at a later time.
It really sucks when you make something awe inspiring and name it appropriately but less than 30 years later other nations are making things 3 to 5 times bigger.
But then due to change in weapons technology or navel doctrine almost a century later and those ships aren't used anymore at all, but very very few things are bigger if any.
@@jlokison While by WWII the navy and public had shifted back to simply calling the latest battleships, battleships.
Shortly before, during and shortly after WW1, the latest largest and most powerful monocaliber battleships, were often called "Superdreadnoughts". Because by WW1, even the first few generations started by HMS Dreadnought, had been rendered obsolete. As those designs had often had at most 12 inch caliber cannons or a broadside of only 8 barrels, wing turrets or other such redundant arrangements compared to a perfected superfiring, were slower sometimes not even using turbines at all, despite being one of HMS Dreadnought crucial innovations. Of course, Superdreadnoughts themselves were by WW1, almost rendered obsolete by the upgunning from 13.5-14 inches, to 15 inches. And by the spread of triple barrel superfiring turrets. However, WW1 and the Treaties put a stop to such rapid development.
And again, during the later years of the interwar period and WW2, battleships weren't actually all classified as battleships. They were classified as "battleships" or "standard battleships", and as "fast battleships". The former being the latest Superdreadnought designs, still significantly slower than cruisers. The latter instead, being almost as fast as battlecruisers (rendering them obsolete), and often equipped with far heavier armament, in the form of the latest generation of 14 or 15 inch cannons, or even 16 inch. Then there's the Yamato with 18.1 inch cannons, but that's a whole other story. There was also the whole "treaty compliant" vs "treaty non compliant" situation, but it was never considered an actually valid classification.
So, in the end, I'd say multiple subclasses of a class. In this case, battleships being divided in pre-dreadnoughts, dreadnoughts, superdreadnoughts. Or standard and fast. Only makes sense in a setting if the actual different designs continue to coexist yet maintain the same role (that of a battleship).
IRL by WW2, the latest vintage of battleships weren't called "Hyperdreadnoughts" or "Supersuperdreanoughts" or something silly like that. Because by then the dreadnought pre-dreadnought distinction had become completely redundant, as no nation had pre-dreadnoughts still in service. Technically not true, since IIRC Germany was supposed to ONLY have those, but since they built Pocket Battleships and not multicalibers. And in general no navy had both mono and multi calibers in service. There was no longer a need to distinguish battleships' vintage, and so usefulness, by subclass. Indeed, except for the USSR, no major nation had dreadnoughts themselves still in service anymore, either, unless as trainers or museums.
In Sci-Fi however, we do often see several tiers of battleships. Dreadnoughts are bigger than standard battleships, or is the name for battleships. Which does solve the issue, since in universe if all battleships are dreadnoughts, then it just means they use a different naming convention than our own. Then, superdreadnoughts are even bigger. Titans bigger than SD. Etcetera etcetera.
One could question why interstellar empires need so many subclasses doing the same role. Ergo, being the big guns and thick armour leading the main battleline, conducting orbital bombardament, showing the flag etcetera.
One option could be, that space is big. Much like IRL, the biggest meanest latest battleships, the ones with the suffix "super" and above. May be too expensive and few in numbers to effectively act as a threat in being for the whole empire. And so, smaller subclasses persist and are updated with new designs. With the role of leading smaller lesser fleets, away from the empire core or hottest border. And also, quite frankly, to act as cannon fodder and slow down the enemy's supers until one's own can show up to end the threat. Or inversely, fight other lesser battleships so one's supers can breakthrough the enemy front and wreck havoc.
In a way, this alien arrangement for modern audiences, is much closer to the Age of Sail. Battleships after all, are an evolution of Ships-of-the-line. Which were divided in different rates, partially because they persisted far past their year of construction, partially because wars were expected to be fought in all kinds of colonial theaters, far away from the empire's cores and so not warrant a permanent defense fleet made up of the latest designs, yet unable to be reached in time by the Home Fleet in case of attack because of slow communications and travel time.
Well for a writer it's whatever sounds cool.
In the real world, battlecruisers were often used poorly - even the concept itself kind of sucks. But in science fiction, battlecruiser just sounds cool. Who cares if those "masters of the sea" sent thinly armored ships that had big guns against well armored ships with big guns and promptly got mauled?
Similarly, "destroyers" sound dangerous - it's going to wreck somebody's day, right?
@@recoil53 Battlecruisers are their own kind of fun because most Sci-Fi use a British classification for ships that at best, if they can be called battlecruisers at all, would be German ones.
Infact, most Sci-Fi battlecruisers remind me more of the Alaska Class Large Cruiser, than any actual battlecruiser ever built. They are usually just Uncaratheristically Big Cruisers. Everything a cruiser does, but bigger.
Or battleships in all but name. Hey, a reverse Fast Battleship evolution would be a fun in universe lore. Instead of battleships becoming so fast they rendered battlecruisers obsolete, in most Sci-Fi apparently battlecruisers followed the Hood fate and got so heavily armoured they rendered battleships obsolete.
@@thefirstprimariscatosicari6870 You know, people argue the Alaska both ways, but they had more weight per round than the Scharnhorst while having comparable armor in the main areas.
Of course Americans by the late 20's preferred much heavier rounds than their European counterparts.
Pretty silly that the Dreadnought name annoys people. It's a badass way of saying it's a big ass ship and makes the situation all the more serious. Also, I love when there are light/heavy ships of every class because that just means more ships and more variety, which is perfect for space games.
I agree, especially light/heavy because they don't necessarily sound like full blown classes of ships, but faster vs tougher loadouts for the same base ship. If I hear about a light frigate and a heavy frigate, I'm going to assume they look pretty similar but the heavy is just chunkier. And with dreadnaughts, I can see it both ways. Specialized "hunter-killer" or flagship battleships that aren't quite their own category all together make as much sense to me as a designated mobile stations to be labeled as dreadnaughts.
In spaceship builder games like Space Engineers, Cosmoteer, or Empyrion I call certain battleships I build "dreadnaughts" if I think the design is particularly capable on it's own in a fight, but that doesn't mean they get their own size category. Although in movies and TV (hell, even books) I definitely believe that dreadnaughts are better depicted as mobile stations of their own entire size category because that's visually and conceptually cooler, as long as they still resemble an actual ship (I wouldn't call the death star a dreadnaught, since it doesn't have the pointless aerodynamic shape that other spaceships do).
TBH the "dreadnought" classification mainly bothers me for the historical reason mentioned in the video. HMS Dreadnought was a battleship of a similar size and displacement as other battleships of the same era - the only difference was the fact that its main armament was all the same caliber rather than a mixture of sizes as had been previously built.
So really, a dreadnought shouldn't be a super-heavy battleship but rather a normal one with a different and revolutionary armament.
@@vicroc4 I completely understand where you're coming from, where the name seems inappropriate because it's original usage was completely different, but the way that I look at it, a label or name shouldn't be off the table just because a single vessel used the name previously. Dreadnaught successfully conveys "big and deadly" which a super-battleship would typically fit the description of, without saying something corny like super-battleship.
TL;DR: The historical application and scifi application are unrelated in my mind
@silverfoxspectre8096 Sure, but then you get settings like Weber's Honorverse where they go and tack a super- on to their dreadnoughts. That's even sillier.
Personally, I prefer the idea of only using "dreadnought" by way of historical analogy to the real ship. I'm in favor of calling all large, heavily armed and armored ships that are intended to go up against other ships "battleships" regardless of their size or armament. Mainly because the term "battleship" directly references a combatant that is intended to be on the front line (it's a "line of battle" ship, as it were).
@@vicroc4 That makes enough sense honestly. I'm currently writing a scifi and in it, I specifically have dreadnaughts and hyperium class ships as dedicated classes, but with 2 distinct definitions from others. Hyperium ships are carriers, and dreadnaughts are battleships, but both of them very specifically cannot enter atmosphere on planets due to their size, whereas the other battleships and carriers can, but also are too mobile to be considered stations. But I think this might just be a case specific exception where functionally different definitions make sense to have separate names.
I like how Sins of a Solar Empire deals with the concept of super large warships, as they are given the new classification of Titan. The game does have a "dreadnought class" but it is mainly used to donate battleships geared to besieging planets rather than slugging it out with other ships.
Master of Orion 2 (1996) already had the titan classification. Size classes in MoO2, excluding fighters and stuff goes as follows:
- Frigate
- Destroyer
- Cruiser
- Battleship
- Titan
- Doomstar
I like the idea of ship having main classification based on what they are built to do followed by shorthand codes for other rolls they can fill and then a sub classification fitted to it's armament capabilities if any.
We already have something like that. For example, if you see "G" anywhere in the hull classification, it's using Guided Missiles (i.e. FFG, SSGN, etc.). It's prefixed by the size of the hull or platform that mounts the weapon (FF = frigate, SS = submarine). If you see a "V" in the class it's for aViation i.e. a carrier (A's were taken by something else first). If you see an "N" it's nuclear powered. There are other examples but these are the most common. If you don't see any special letters after the hull or platform, you know it's (a) conventionally powered (steam, gas turbine, or diesel/electric) and conventionally armed (guns for surface ships, torpedoes for subs).
The only time the above gets weird is with sizes and overall firepower. Current US Navy "frigates" and "destroyers" have more firepower and -- in some cases -- more length, beam, or displacement than some WW2-era cruisers.
@@ThePrisoner881 whit the US vs the rest of the world.
there is a bit of the US is the only nation that design its ship whit the notion and expectation that it needs to sail 3 laps around the world.
wile most other nations navy will run out of gas and service hour before getting a 1/3 across the Atlantic.
aka US ship be bigger to fit all the potato and lubrication oil needed for a long sail.
((PS the Potato bit is no joke on some US ship there is a room labeled Potato storage).
I think it isn't wierd that modern "frigates" and "destroyers" is larger and have more firpower than WW2-era cruisers. Because modern "frigates" and "destroyers" is classifed against each other and not ww2 warships. I think the wierdest part is Zumwalt-class destroyer being bigger and heavier than Ticonegora cruiser but having less armament, thought it might be the reason why it still called "Destroyer" more to armament not size
I personally have no problem with the Dreadnought classification. Sure historically (earth history might not even be a thing in the sci-fi universe in question) it doesn't make much sense, but if you build a massive warship what else would you call it then "fear nothing" in fancy olden tongue?
There's a lot of other things to call them, honestly.
well, Dreadnought was an actual classification of... Well, 'super battleships' that existed pre and during WW1. Though mutual treaties signed by nations either scrapped ships of that size, reduced armament caliber, or were converted into carriers. Japan in particular did this initially after the Washington Naval Treaty to outwardly comply with the US' demands while working on the Yamato class in secret. It's how Japan rather quickly had a naval aviation fleet that was on parity with the US despite it's more limited industrial capabilities.
@@argokarrus2731 IMO if you're gonna call it a Dreadnaught it has to be on a different scale to other ships. In Star Wars there's that jump in size between a Star Destroyer and a Super Star Destroyer. But that's kind of extreme.
In Honor Harrington, a battleship is 2 - 4 million tons. A Dreadnaught is 5 - 6.5 million tons and a Super Dreadnaught is 7 - 9 millions tons. But they also emphasize that the big ships are expensive, take months to build and need other ships to balance out a fleet. Heavy Cruisers, and BattleCruisers are vital to protecting Dreadnaughts and Super Dreadnaughts during fleet engagements. These ships never get into solo fights.
See, and I dislike the class "Dreadnought". I'd rather new classes of ship be made up instead. For example, Star Destroyers in Star Wars are basically mobile bases. They have the armament of a Battleship, usually carry enough strike craft to also be a carrier, and also generally carry enough ground troops to act as a Forward Operating Base for invasions or boarding actions......
So, instead of having Star Destroyers be Star Destroyers OR Battlecruiers OR Star Dreadnoughts, why not make them all just different classifications of Star Destroyers, with Executors and Mega classes being truly mobile bases? New classification just for Star Wars use: Star Destroyer - A capital ship that acts as a mobile forward operating base or headquarters.
@@Eagledelta3 Star wars is not a good example of ship classing. Its all over the place. Its Star Destroyers are as fast Battlecruisers with Dreadnought guns. Kind of dumb.
Drachinifel has a good video concerning the confusing classification of modern warships. in short the base line core will come by the way of destroyers (torpedo boat destroyers origionally), cruisers, and battleships. when frigates and corvettes got added back in the terms got muddled as the names were poorly applied to their historic usages.
Time for a Drachinifel-Space Dock crossover.
@@sfpesq dont forget sacred cow shipyards
There were few Drach talks Trek episodes and he never said no if some other SF centered channel would like to colaborate. :)
Ship classifications is much like cladistics in the animal kingdom. It feels intuitive when you look at the broad categories, until you begin to examine it and find all the loopholes and exceptions and special cases. But the alternative is to have no classification at all, and have to always explain each one individually.
In the 19th century the US Navy tried 2 different classification systems. The first was based on shot weight and was based around how much weight was being put out in a single broadside. Of course, by the end of the Civil War many ships were using turrets so that system didn't last too long before being replaced by one based around tonnage.
I've always thought tonnage makes the most sense for a sci-fi setting, but shot weight could be very interesting if you were using lasers.
Rather than weight, I suppose you could instead measure by energy output. Lasers and similar weapons wouldn't have much "shot weight", but even conventional weapons with chemical-propelled ammo, even missiles, would all have an "energy output". Similar to classifying bombs by their TNT-equivalent yield.
@@vedritmathias9193 in Renegade Legion weapons were rated according to their size/output. Though not sure I'd rate a frigate by its broadside capacity 25x 37.5/20 doesn't really do it you know? Funnily enough though it's a setting that capital ships and ground forces don't bother with particle weapons, it's mainly lasers and missiles in Leviathan except for a few specialist mass driver cannons.
There was also a time when classification was done by bore size. But nothing stopped people from putting 6'' guns, the maximum for light cruisers, onto the hull made for a heavy cruiser.
I'm a simple man, I see the Yamato, I like
just to add extra confusion destroyers used to be a lot smaller and specialised, compared to frigates. But post-ww2 started getting bigger and bigger till they effectively superseded battleships due to missile tech. They used to be a covette-ish type vessel for defending against motor-torpedo boats - "Torpedo Boat Destroyer"
In a scifi setting where you run into aliens, it'd be very likely they'd have completely different classifications, weapon types, and roles from your fleet. Allowing the discovery of the systems, roles, & capabilities behind classifications to be entertaining in & of itself.
A great example of a sci-fi setting explaining proper fleet designations in my opinion would be the Honoverse series of novels by David Weber. Different warship classifications have specific roles and limitations, but the story includes inevitable power creep seen in real life naval designations. A Manticorian battlecruiser of the later books is specifically called out as being significantly bigger and more powerful than the ones of the earlier books in much the same way a modern guided missile destroyer is significantly larger and more powerful than the first torpedo boat destroyers.
Along with proper ship classifications, the Honervers also dispenes with the silly trope of Admirals commanding their own flagships. In the Honorverse they actually have Flag Captains commanding their flagships, just like their real life counterparts.
I loved when one ranted that even if it was as big as a "battleship" it was a "battlecruiser" because it just WAS.
@@bencoomer2000 To be fair...all a real battlecruiser is is a battleship with cruiser armor so that they could be "faster". Battleships slug it out with battleships while battlecruiser were meant to chase, catch, and kill cruisers. As for the Honorverse, battleships were largely made redundant when dreadnought and super dreadnought designs made their appearance. Haven was basically the only power to keep some around and then they were typically more rear-guard. As the Manticore-Haven wars progressed, the rapid technological advances resulted in ever larger battlecruiser designs that eventually were in the lower end of the mass range of the older obsolete battleship designs. Especially when the pod laying battlecruiser designs were launched.
Im fine with "Dreadnought" being a class term despite originating with HMS Dreadnought. Given it spawned its own subclass of *Dreadnought* Battleships, and that name being shortened to Dreadnoughts, I think its fine to apply the name as a class.
I wouldn't say subclass so much as the original began a new era of design. No more sponsons and wing turrets. One size of main gun. It was the defining point, which all naval designers followed.
The best way to actually read that descriptor is like this.
When we started making bicycles, there were various designs that people had in mind. Before that, you had a lot of different designs, a lot of them really, really strange.
Then, all of a sudden, the modern bicycle was invented, with its chain, pedals, equal sized wheels. All of a sudden, when it started becoming popular, and all the old types of bicycles became largely irrelevant, historians began to refer to those bicycles as "Penny-Farthings" or other such terms. But during their time, everyone just called them, well... bicycles. Because they were, and still are bicycles, but *historians* need ways to distinguish between these different categories.
And so: Penny-Farthings bicycles. During their time, they were just called bicycles.
And similarly: Dreadnought-battleships. During their time, they were just called battleships.
@@TheHazelnoot this applies more to pre-dreadnoughts than dreadnoughts.
The biggest political workaround involving battleship classifications in Sci-Fi is definitely the way Trek's Starfleet does things. Because of UFP's peace-loving nature, the pre-Dominion war Galaxy class was basically a battleship disguised as a cruise liner, and the Defiant class started a trend of every combat oriented ship being called an "escort vessel".
Peace loving, yet somehow the Federation's ships were never undergunned in comparison to local powers.
Yes, it's only a cruiser but somehow it stands up to the most powerful Klingon and Romulans ships.
@@recoil53 That's because most Federation ships we see are officially exploration ships, and frequently travel to regions that have little to no information available. When the Federation legitimately uses their ships for exploration, the weapon loadout is a case of prepare for the worst.
The concept has historical precedent. Most exploration parties traveling new lands were armed to the teeth.
@@reaperreaper5098 Yes, but most exploration parties don't look like an invasion fleet.
Don't forget that the Galaxy class is not only well armed, it's huge. It can carry 20K. Most explorations were small parties on relatively small vessels. The Intrepid would fit the part more.
Expoloration vessels were mostly frigates by the time of British ranking system. You want speed and limited crew as every gunner need to eat and drink. Unless you have replicators that is.
@Antoni Sauren The primary counterpoint to this is that in Star Trek, the Federation knows that there are enemy factions that they would eventually run into in most longer expeditions, and massive losses to crew wasn't uncommon when that happened.
That, and standing back to examine the Star Trek Universe from perspectives other than the Federation's, it's easy to come to the conclusion that the Federation was constantly wanting to provoke fights by "exploring" contested zones to justify more war oriented starships.
Why wouldn't the warships go to classes to get an education and improve themselves?
I see what you did there lol!
Their grades are always c-level
There's an anime about that, because of course there is.
1:39 battle carriers have historically been a thing but they're usually kind of ramshackle and it has the trademark jack-of-all-trades issue it's a good multi-role vessel but considering you will always be operating within a fleet it's better to just have a carrier or a battleship not both
IRL? Was any a good multi-role vessel? The need for a deck and the fact that you want that deck intact keep it from being good.
Battlecarriers might make a lot of sense in space, as the only ship in a system. They would be carrying patrol boats (doing rounds for several days with several crew) instead of single pilot fighters though.
@@recoil53 Depends, I suppose. Carriers are technically multirole, in that they are only limited by what they can field on deck... but a carrier with like, cruiser guns on it for use in actual battle... haha no definitely not.
@@TheHazelnoot The second is what I'm talking about. The first is still a pure carrier, what is carries doesn't change that.
Oddly, even late in WWII America was looking to make half carrier - half battleships to make use of the Montana hull. Even with all that carrier experience.
Having your own CAP in age of dominant aircraft isn't bad idea. That's why everything large enough in SW carries at least few fighters. But take away shields, throw flight deck and it's become useless in gunfight pretty fast and you'd wish to get back those aft turrets.
Was checking on this recently, as far as light and heavy cruisers go, the light and heavy refer to the type of guns they can mount, and not necessarily their relative size.
And then there's the weirdness that were monitors in the WWII-era; destroyer-ish sized ships that were built around carrying a single battleship-sized gun (kind of reminds me of sci-fi ships like Halo's UNSC vessels, actually). Edge cases and outliers can always make trying to categorize things that aren't perfectly homogenous weird.
@@LashknifeTalon isn't that coastal defense ship aka coastal battleship?
Light and heavy cruisers were usually based on their armourer levels as well as gun size.
I am quite fine with a lot of stuff with sci-fi being weird, even dreadnoughts, despite the historical reference, mainly the nature of what the introduction of the dreadnought meant to pre dreadnoughts, it’s a type of battleship but it’s a type that surpasses all the prior ones. How I would classify ships if I was creating a sci-fi setting (the one I used when I was thinking of when I wanted to build multiple ship classes in space engineers) was mainly based on their mission profiles.
Also thought I should add what I used prefixes for, usually the ships with ‘light’ just kind of meant it’s more stripped down and geared for atmospheric operations while the ‘heavy’ are strictly limited to space operations, such as light cruiser and heavy cruisers, I used frigates similar to how the US has its doctrines built around them being multi purpose littoral ships, and so they can operate in atmosphere, while the destroyers are more focused on space escort and ship to ship combat only
Using dreadnought to refer to giant superbattleships is something I think fits. While it was originally the name of a particular ship that was revolutionary for its day, even without that historical context a word that essentially means "fear[s] nothing" already speaks of what the ship is and what it can do.
In other words, classification is nice on paper.
And Spacedock is an excellent channel.
Because I guess they really do read the comments.
Now and then😉
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
When I was outlining the ship classification for my fictional universe (using mass, hull length, crew size, and weapon mounts) there was, of course, a lot of overlap between the different types - especially in the larger, heavier types.
I went with this because, as in real life, a ship could have the specs of a different type but be called another. These are generally outliers and don't represent the bulk of their type, but for the sake of keeping this recorded, standardized, and categorized, they still have the be included.
Things get particularly muddy when it comes to the "super *something*"s. Super carriers, super battleships, whatever, don't follow any rules except that they're the biggest, heaviest, and gunniest of all the ship types, but differentiating one super type from another super is more arbitrary.
Especially since there's always going to be a degree of role overlap, that just avoids over-specialisation which can lead to other issues with your navy. The only super anything I had was the Epic-class carriers, and that's because they dwarf literally everything in universe, intended as long range independent border patrol with sufficient stores for 2 years of continuous patrol before RTB and cycling crew. And there's only the two of them, the third keel (the final planned even then) was put on hold even before the war began in favour of focusing on more useful general production.
I think the Battleship/Dreadnought distinction derives more from sequel escalation more than anything else. It seems most settings introduce battleships as the "big" vessel as the term Battleship is more recognizable. Later, they come back with an even bigger vessel and so need a new name for it and it seems Dreadnought is filling that role. Interesting question: What will the name be for ships that are even bigger than Dreadnoughts?
One interesting exception to the usual Battleship/Dreadnought distinction is Star Fleet Battles as the Star Trek Technical Manual it was based on introduced the Dreadnought as the Federation big ship. So when the game introduced even bigger ships, those got the Battleship name.
practically anything beyond dreadnaught in star wars understanding becomes impractical as a warship and may as well be a mobile space station eg. the supremacy or Deathstars.
Super Dreadnoughts.
When enough time passes the old dreadnought becomes the new norm and the next big step up will become the next dreadnought.
The exact minute this video went live, my Steam guide on ship classifications received an award. Gonna blame Hooji for the attention i've received!
I feel that larger ships like Dreadnaughts or battleships in scifi could be interesting as some sort of moveable space station to act as sort of a home base during an offensive. I could also see them as platforms for massive siege weapons that are too large for even cruisers to fit on them.
I could also see it being a pride thing. Like there is no logical reason for these massive warships but they look scary and can show off how powerful your military is that it can manufacturer this waste of resources.
Personally I am more of a fan of ships being usually named by what their use in the fleet. Like destroyers, rather than size, are based on a their use as fast ships with heavy forward weapons while the cruiser is more designed to be fast and have decent range so it can act independent of a large support fleet. Not perfect but feel it would work better than just being on size.
While what qualifies as a "massive" weapon could still be a blurry line, it would be neat if there were some technologies that just really couldn't be scaled down well at all, so a dreadnought was anything big enough to mount a space-folding weapon or something, which required at least 1.5km of ship and 15GW of power.
Historically, obsolete battleship often converted into support ship ( like repair ship, coal bunker, training ship, etc. ) .
Would be cool if a sci-fi navy also would also utilize the massive hull of obsolete dreadnoughts and battleships in the same manner.
For sci-fi settings I consider the dreadnaught category to be "whatever is currently the scariest" just like when the original Dreadnaught was built.
My ships designs are usually more classified by intended role. Escorts, Patrol Ship, Frigates for things like escorting and border defense.
Destroyers, Crusiers for solo or small group military action. Battleship, Heavy Crusier, Dreadnought for larger fleet actions. Size does matter, but usually size goes hand and hand with role.
A good other weird example would be one of the recent German "Frigate" design proposals which clock in at about 14000 tons which is really damned heavy.
The modern classification systems are quite wired yet it's all down to different nations classification systems yet NATO (well the US) blankets everyones ships under their classification systems.
Yes germany has that MEKO A300 meanwhile china has the Type 055 destroyer at 13000t yet the US class it as a cruiser which is funny since they have the Zumwalt class at 15656t yet that's a destroyer by their standards (iirc it's all down to how many VLS they have).
My country has a 7500t destroyer (Hobart class) yet the ship it's a subclass to is considered a frigate by the Spanish.
Heh there's a 5000t corvette in one current nation that's replacing a slightly smaller ship that's considered a frigate.
Yep classification is truly all over the place.
Germany also has a 1800 ton corvette that is in equipment like an light antisurface frigate and a 7200t frigate that replaced a 5700t frigate that replaced a 4700t destroyer and itself is supposed to be suceeded by a 10550 t frigate.
My "favorite" will always be the cluster that is the Freespace ship classification system. Cruisers are the smallest, then corvettes, then destroyers (hybrid battleship/carriers), then the juggernauts (Sathanas, Colossus)
I just came by to say the same thing!
Thank you so much for showing Winchell Chung's Analysis, I never knew it existed and was struggling to show this for years until now. This is incredible!
It can work with so many things and I cant wait to use it!
Larger ships being referred to as dreadnoughts never bothered me simply because of how cool the word sounds. I mean it has the word dread in it...that automatically gives this sense of power, perhaps the feeling it instills in it's enemies, that makes you know this ship probably means business. The terms that bother me are more the added on words like: protected cruiser, attack cruiser, fast attack cruiser. Those terms seem meaningless, but I suppose they add flavor to the setting.
those terms define a sub role within the classification. But what defines a ship as "light" or "fast" obviously differs from setting to setting and period to period.
When it comes to having the term Dreadnaught for the massive ships, i personally call them by the term Titan Battleships after the ship type from Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion, a massive ship that you can only build a limited number
Plus using existing ship classifications lets you save brainspace for things that are specific to your setting. For example, my setting has a ship class called a 'skiff.' It's basically a heavy shuttle that's FTL-capable. There's not a lot of room for amenities and they're generally used for courier duty, high-priority transport of personnel/small cargoes, that sort of thing.
in my opinion, the biggest factor in ship classification is its role in a fleet for an example Corvettes are supposed to be ships that would protect, larger ships from enemy spacecraft, so that larger ships can use their appointments for stuff like missiles
You used world of warships music freaking sweet
A shame no footage from it was used as well.
During the Age of Sail, classes were determined by the number of guns they have
count of gun and weight of gun that could be carried. rassie frigates or cut down ships of the line had the hull strength to carry larger guns than purpose built frigates while retaining the masting of their prior form.
Not classes, types (or rates, in the age of sail, thought also types as several rates were one type (1st, 2nd and 3rd rate ships of the line etc) and unrated ships had several types).
USS Nimitz is a Nimitz class Aircraft Carrier, USS Iowa is an Iowa class battleship.
Aircraft Carrier and Battleships are their types, not their classes.
Similarly in Age of Sail there was, for example, there was the Océan class 1st rate ship of the line.
Great video! I always got confused later on because in many Trek games, "Dreadnaught" was always one step smaller than Battleship, so was funny to learn later that this wasn't the case in most other universes.
It's funny how rarely Trek TV and movies actually used these terms too. I can rarely remember them mentioning a term "frigate" or "dreadnaught" in dialogue but never showing a ship on film. And so who really knows what the Miranda, Oberth, etc. really are?
Well, we know the Constitution class were cruisers. The Galaxy I'm not so sure about, but Star Trek Online classes it as a cruiser as well, and the alternate-timeline version with three nacelles and a spinal phaser lance is considered a dreadnought.
The thing is, we see that universe mostly from the perspective of a faction that doesn't do warships.
Don't forget the Dreadnaught-Class Heavy Cruiser and Battlecruiser rated Imperial star destroyer, and their cruiser rated cousin the Victory Star Destroyer [not to be confused with Babylon-5's Victory class Destroyer which is somewhere between a battleship and dreadnaught]
Dreadnaught-Class Heavy Cruiser was largest interstelar warship compliant with post Ruusan treaties while in imperial era it was just CA, so it makes some sense in this regard.
@@antonisauren8998 yeah the SW version of the Washington Naval Treaties
Whose violation led to the ships that inspired the Star Destroyer: Yamato and Bismarck
I think "Dreadnought" as a term for the massive capital ships clad in armor and guns is actually quite apt for a few reasons. The term means "Fear nothing" and these ships are almost always depicted as fleet-killers (or glass cannons, but that's another topic enterally). It stands to reason that a single ship that can actually challenge an entire armada by itself and win handedly isn't afraid of much.
It also is just a really tough, manly word that (somewhat ironically) invokes fear and apprehension. "Dreadnought".. It just sounds mean, "Shotgun" is another such word. Even if you didn't know what it meant, something about the way the syllables hit invokes a sense of toughness and rigidity. Case in point, I first heard the word when I was about 16 from the movie Deathrace 2009. I didn't know what the HMS Dreadnought was then, and had never heard the word before to the best of my knowledge. Even before it came on screen, I was like "Ohh shit, that sounds scary" (Best part of the whole movie was that truck, lol)
So I really don't think the HMS Dreadnought is exactly what's being referenced when such ships use that classification, Though I can see from that point of view why it'd be annoying; But I'd argue that's not actually the case. Rather the meaning of the name itself is what's being referenced. "Fear nothing" is also a term that alien cultures would certainly understand, and if your IP has UTs or something similar, "Dreadnought" should translate over to their language fairly smoothly. "Frigate" might mean "breakfast sandwich" to them and "cruiser" might mean "looking for sex"... Could argue it already does.
They're also used incorrectly most of the time IMO. They should take on a similar role to modern supercarriers. That is force projectors with long range strike capabilities, not front line combat vessels crashing their way through shit point blank and running interception of starfighters. They should also be able to take a massive amount of damage compared to their smaller counterparts and have multiple redundancies. Poes' X-wing should have gotten shwacked by air-defenses and alert fighters before it got anywhere near that Dreadnought. You've got that much room for weapon systems, you have point defense guns and missiles too. And ones that turn at a considerable rate unlike those antiques they have in Star Wars.
Though that hyper-visual, close range stuff can be cool too I guess. The lack of battlegroups/fleets is another thing SciFi often just ignores, Star Trek being the worst offender IMO. Shouldn't the flagship of the federation have at least a couple escorts? The answer is yes, yes it should. That is largley dependent on the setting too.
In Trek its excusable because when they say 'flagship' they mean it in the sense of diplomatic and best representation sense.
When it's primary role is exploration, diplomacy and first contact, going everywhere with a small battlegroup in tow would give off the wrong first impression from what Starfleet wants.
When an actual straight up war happens( like the Dominion War in DS9) they do have escorts and and actual fleets.
Though in that case the war refit Galaxy class is apparently more of a Star Wars style Dreadnought because in most battles depicted they just Leeroy Jenkins themselves into battle and start wading through the enemy fleet sowing chaos and destruction while the rest of the fleet has to actually use tactics.
Like in one battle where they hit the enemy battle line, broke through it, kept going, ran out of ships to blow up, and turned around to do it again and met the Sisko and the rest of the fleet just now hitting the line from behind the enemy lines.
Apparently when you replace all the science labs and suite sized crew quarters with photon torpedoes and phaser banks the Galaxy class is pretty overpowered.
It really helps with this kind of thing to have a strong ability to suspend my disbelief! It also helps that I started with Star Wars and Star Trek at a pretty young age so the idea of Destroyers being planet glassing battleships and dreadnaughts being super massive versions of those destroyers just feels normal for me. Also cruisers being effectively multi role ships of the line as in star trek again just makes a certain amount of sense. Yeah, it's easy to keep adding classifications for everything, but sometimes simplicity helps a lot. Case in point, the book series I'm reading at the moment focuses on space fleet battles and movements and has distinct roles for each classification of ship, from the smallest, Destroyers or Hunter Killers, depending on side, and Light Cruisers, to medium size, Heavy Cruisers, to the big hitters, Battle Cruisers and Battleships, and even on one side, the Fast Fleet Auxiliaries. So long as there's an internal logic to the logistics of your setting and the fleet within, (to me) it really doesn't matter. You could call the Yamato a sloop if the logic of your system made internal sense!
Really enjoy the channel! Small nitpick, "irregardless" is not a word. Thanks for the content!
I knew I'd love watching this video (literally anything you guys put out), but something about this one was so engaging and fun to watch! And of course I've heard of this ambiguous problem before and really nice to have it all laid out and cross referenced haha
There is a super easy way to tell a boat from a ship.
Boats lean in like a motorcycle, ships lean out like a car.
Submarine are boats because they lean into the turn.
On surface, under water or both?
@@oditeomnes Both, sort of. Submarines always lean into the turn.
Doesn't hold up once you get to space.
Corvettes are boats because they don't have an XO
In Star Wars it somehow fits that the Executor class is a dreadnought and the ISD class is a destroyer. As in real life, destroyers are much smaller than battleships. And to be honest, almost all ships in Star Wars are just better gunboats, except for the frigates, of course. Victory class for example. And the fact that the Executor is a dreadnought fits the class, as the name suggests. unless an A-wing is nearby
What is destroyer supposed to destroy? It can't tackle the star for sure. It ain't Star Trek or Anderson novel. SD is a hybrid battlecruiser/carrier/assault ship, but they were never intended as escorts even if look like that next to Executor.
Than SSD isn't a battleship. They are build for no reason other than prestige yacht for you Grand Moff/Admiral. Never deployed together as a fleet but it's centerpiece. Like were there any battles outside 3rd Orinda where more than one was deployed per side? So it's used similarly to a modern supercarrier.
@@antonisauren8998 I think it's like a naval destroyer. what does it destroy? he has torpedoes and artillery. if you go by the destroyers of ww1 and ww2. The battlecruiser concept is oddly related to starships. why should i have battleship armament and therefore be less armored in space? i mean look at an ISD and a battleship from the german empire. The ISD is almost half a German battleship optically with the deflector shields that serve as a reference point. or the Bismarck class and Tirpiz. The Raddus is probably a battlecruiser from the description. More than an ISD. i think you can pursue the philosophy to infinity as far as the ships are concerned. But the SSDs were a key part of huge battles like Jakku or Vader's Death Squadron. In terms of the Star Wars universe, I think they're more psychological weapons anyway, since Palpatine has already de-technologyized everything. and if you're honest, an SSD is enough for absolute terror from a planet you want to threaten.
Executor with support fleet was stopped by planetary shield and without it lone ISD can glass surface in given time as well so is bigger triangle better terror weapon? Both are visible from surface with naked eye so only difference is in shadows size.
The Honorverse starts off with a fairly clearly defined set of categories based on warship size. But thanks to the wartime arms race leading to ever increasing sizes of ships, by the later books the two main warring factions are building destroyers that dwarf most other navies' light cruisers.
The Yamato is really underrated and a very fine looking ship. Its nice that you guys are using footage from the show more.
Thou Andromeda breaks with hybrid of ww 2 battleship and futuristic space craft.
Ngl I can't help but hate BSY designs in every single capacity.
Speaking of which, I love the thought that was put into the design of the Yamato and Andromeda, which is relevant to this vid.
Yamato was designed for detached service on special assignment, having a significant number of defensive guns and a full fighter squadron to satisfy the needs of that role.
Andromeda on the other hand was designed as the offensive weapons flagship of a full battlegroup, with very few defensive guns and fighters, relying on its escort destroyers, cruisers, and carriers for those roles.
@@argokarrus2731 May I ask why? I think they're some of the best looking ships around.
The Yamato and Gotengo from Atragon are two great warships with a classic military sci fi-look.
Adding to the confusion, at one point, the Frigate was just below a cruiser, and a destroyer was a much smaller ship. Star Wars uses this system. And some interpretations of Star Trek use this.
It's much easier when thinking about mission profile than the size. And even then in SW there is no destroyer. Recusant? Prentioch's Adz-class? They have nothing in common and should be CL and FF respectively. Closest thing would be DP20 or MC-30 due to their missile centered arment that are classified as corvette and frigate. xd
Very good material, nice compendium :)
Pleasant to listen and to watch.
Dreadnoughts don’t usually bother me like the Invisible Hand Dreadnought. Dreadnoughts are just a more developed types of battleship, and all battleships built after that were Dreadnought battleships. Or near enough all. It only fell out of use when all the pre-dreadnoughts were scrapped in the 20s after their service life ended.
My thing about the classification system is it doesn't classify all potential armor and armament layouts and loadouts. Like, imagine having a million ships with the first one having a single turret with a single gun measuring .01 of an inch and the hull being .01 of an inch. Then each ship either increases the turret number by 1, the gun per turret by 1, the gun's size by .01 or the hull by .01. What would a ship with 4 or 5 turrets with 1× 5" cannon per turret but 50" armor be called? Or a ship with 20× 20" cannons but only .01 hull?
Yup, like the Edinburgh subclass, 13175 t light cruisers with 12x 6'' guns or the New Orleans class heavy cruiser, 12463 t loaded with 9x 8'' guns.
More guns and more displacement, and yet a light cruiser because the guns are smaller.
@@HappyBeezerStudios So they were heavy light cruisers? 😂
@@proudamerican183 not to be confused with light heavy cruisers
The biggest pet peeve by far in sci fi is when there's some sort of "super carrier" that is basically a carrier, a battleship and troop transport all in one. It's more interesting when you have different classes of ships for different roles, not one that can do everything.
And it'd only work in a universe that conforms to "bigger is actually safer" physics, and that's not always the case. A sane military would never put so many eggs in one basket unless they are certain it's practically impenetrable, then the question is, how does that thing actually MOVE? :D
I think the even bigger problem is that these ships are then magically really good at all their capabilities. Like i love BSG but the battlestars are somehow both superior battleships AND superior carriers? Nah.
@@thakillman7 I mean, if the technological gap is sufficient I can imagine how that would happen
@@rattslayer Carrier design and battleship design are basically antithetical to one another. It's not really something you can solve with more *tech*. You'd end up with an overly complicated, expensive and vulnerable ship that also performs worse and for what?
@@CaptChang
It actually does make quite a bit of sense to go larger when it comes to space travel. Particularly in hyper realistic settings.
It's a bit tough for me to explain but it has something to do with the square cube law and how much fuel and supplies you can carry.
A UA-camr by Isaac Arthur explains it much better.
I think the destroyer confusion comes from the fact they *sound* so powerful and almost no one knows the history of the name. Hint for those who need it: "Torpedo Boat Destroyer"
Thanks for the video!
I've recently realised that the biggest problem in ship classification is that things can be done in different scales.
Thus, I like one approach from a paritcular EAW mod: you split the classes into size and role. This untangles things a bit, as you can have a Destroyer role ship of the Cruiser size, if its purpose is to do Destroyer things but it's bigger. If a setting has fighters, a role of Carrier could also be applied at different scales: from something like a frigate sized Quasar to a Battlecruiser sized Secutor. Or even better: the Altor is significantly larger then a Home One type MC80, but it cannot compete with it in combat, as its a replenishment ship; a mobile repair yard. Or the Invincible class, which at the time of the CW was so outdated that despite being bigger then Venators, it could at most accomplish picketing.
Sorry that I talked only about SW ships, but there is such a variety of capabilities there that its easiest to bring up good examples.
It comes and goes, classes often have an additional nomenclature historically for their role though it seems to be sliding out again because most ships don't fulfill a singular role currently, an FFG (Guided Missile Frigate) is often deployed for ASW and/or AAW, sometimes either varying outfit for the role in the same class or being equally capable as is with what's onboard.
TLDR: no, ship classes don't 'make sense' because they're arbitrary and based on historical precedent rather than an objective set of qualifications (designs under the Washington/London naval treaties notwithstanding and even then the definitions of classes were _very_ loose).
Thank you for this insightful video!
1:35 Hey bro, Battle Carriers are cool. If IRL denied me that dream, let me dream in Sci-Fi!!
Loved the video as usual, always cool to see the convergent thinking that goes on in this community as I've also had similar thoughts on Destroyer Ambiguity as you mentioned in this video!
I love Star Fleet Battles for the fact that the ship classes are well defined and make sense.
@@Emanon... Hes talking about star fleet, why do you bring star wars into that? xD
@@hernerweisenberg7052he not talking about Star Trek Starfleet but Starship Fleet/armada in general
@@ZeroDarkness- As you can see, I wrote this in reply to someone who deleted his his post, because the OP was talking about Star Fleet, and the guy i replied to attacked him with something i can barely remeber now, but was attacking his statement with something like "ey starwars isn't well defined at all" or something like this.
I would say at least the Carrier is pretty consistent, but even then in sci-fi you have stuff like Halo's frigates and IRL you have smaller ships capable of 'carrying' a helicopter or two.
Ehh you have Battle Carriers
Even stuff like the CR-90 could carry up to 4 fighters
Battleship Carrier hybrids are more common in sci-fi than true carriers
@@TheAchilles26 sir, they are called BattleStar’s. There is a whole show, and a reboot, about how cool a battle carrier is.
The hybrid carriers have their roots in warships, typically Battleships that had 1-2 floatplanes as recon auxiliaries. The BBs had enough 'spare' tonnage to equip something like that. Modern ships use helicopters more like Star Trek shuttles, the equivalent of a small boat.
Fun fact: In the Spanish classification frigates and destroyers are switched: frigates are the ones which are larger and are on the middle between a light patrol/support ship and a medium ship.
I like how you use the battlezone 2 menu music for your intro. That was nostalgic.
I think the interwar classifications are pretty cool... The British with their fast battleships, Germany and their pocket battleships, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and the Japanese building 2 monstrosities hidden from everyone just to get around treaty.
It was a very clear system as well based off armament, though the emergence of the 'fast battleship' in the late 30s blurred the line between battleship and battle cruiser
@@duvetofreason16 yes and so did the pocket battleships... they were armoured enough to survive against any cruiser but only had the firepower of a cruiser. In other words the opposite of a fast battleship/battle cruiser
They also turned a number of their 'excess' battleships after the signing of the treaty into carriers. Which is what allowed them to have such a large navel air fleet/arm that was close to if not matching the US, despite their low industrial base and materials.
Just a quick reminder that "pocket battleship" is as correct as calling Arleigh Burke a battleship.
Media calls it, public does.
But it is just annoying
@@Poctyk it had enough armour to tank shots from anything under a battleship... so what would you suggest calling it... plus the Mikasa is considered a battleship if I'm not mistaken.
Here’s an idea: a “dreadnought” that refers NOT to any vessel or class, but to the crew themselves and together.
The vessel is expendable, but the Dreadnought crew will never fail to serve, and will never give up their mission!!
No, if the heroes lack fear that makes them Intrepid. Gotta keep up.
@@RorikH you don’t think they ‘hold dread for nought’?
David Webber in his Honor Harrington did this breakdown and how messy it gets very well. Later in the series many ships of one class moved so far up in size as to be well past earlier versions of the next class up.
I've been waiting for this episode!
The premise of the video's title is flat out incorrect. There are plenty of universes/SciFi where the ship classes not only make sense but make *more* sense than in reality, such as universes that treat all warship/direct combatant classes as exclusively denoting length or gross tonnage from gunship to dreadnought. There are tons of examples of this, and there are multiple systems which make classes make perfect sense. In the traditonal sense a class is only supposed to indicate which 'league' a ship is to be placed in to give you an idea of the total scope of capability, and I would argue that *most* systems do a decent job of this, with overlap and subjectivity only really coming into play where there is *actual* subjectivity in how the ship can be used, which means the system is working as intended and is accurately describing the vessel.
Your point about dreadnoughts also makes no sense, yes HMS Dreadnought was a battleship, but she rendered all prior battleships so obsolete that they were no longer considered fully battleships and were literally referred to as "pre-dreadnought type" battleships. This means they have literally been out *classed* by dreadnoughts, meaning it makes perfect logical sense for them to be a 'higher' class, and we basically saw this happen in reality too, there was just no impetuous to have that gap that the pre-dreadnoughts filled at the time...until we got battlecruisers. In the same way at the end of WWII we started to get designs for so called 'super battleships' that were starting to outclass all other battleships, which is literally what a dreadnought is, a convenient word for 'super battleships'.
If you get into the etymology and very specific with semantics then yes, sure, it *is* odd how in the real world warship classes have gotten and kept their names, particularly when we look at corvettes and destroyers (even frigates have some wonky history) but that need not apply to a fictional and futuristic universe, these are words which are now being used unburdened from their past in many cases
Realistically, an effective ship classification system would probably more resemble a serial number than something as flowery as "Dreadnaught". Basically, it would just be a number that lays out ship tonnage, reactor power, maximum acceleration... such like that, and even then those things get messy. If one faction employs a ship whose reactor power is half that of it's contemporaries, but whose primary munitions use ammunition with self-contained power sources or otherwise can provide significant firepower without significant reactor, how do you handle that? Ships are complicated beasts, and while usually inaccurate, classifications like "corvette" or "battleship" at least give you a point of reference to start judging a ship by.
On the flip side it could be even more difficult in a fictional setting where aliens use different technologies, designs, and combat styles, and thus don't always fit neatly into each others' classifications.
I think it's safe to say sci-fi uses the term dreadnought for their largest, most powerful ships because the name itself has an intimidating sound to it. Hence they classify their most intimidating ships after it.
Not much more than terms like invincible, titan, behemoth, etc, big and mean.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Not so much. Not in my opinion at least. Dreadnought has a certain intimidating factor that your other examples lack.
@@theonedollarbill4550 ahh the kamikaze factor
The "dreadnaughts are superships" bothers me a lot less than using "irregardless."
I had a lot of fun with this stuff in developing my own (unused) sci-fi setting. I had the "major" human civilization be pretty consistent and easy to understand, all based around how big a spinal mass driver they could mount (even if they didn't have one), plus other elements. Other human groups or alien species might use different criteria in all sorts of combinations. I really like details like that in my settings.
For me, the Yamato in Space Battleship Yamato is more like a dreadnought than a battleship as it is larger and more powerful, conventionally, compared to a known battleship type that exists in the Earth space fleet.
That’s a good point but I think calling it a battleship is appropriate because 99% of the pre contact UNCF fleet was barely comparable to gamilas cruisers. The yamato was the first UNCF ship that could truly go toe to toe with the gamilas and walk out with minor damage rather than being absolutely curb stomped.
DREADNOUGHTS ARE BATTLESHIPS
Yeah, actually. If memory serves they ended up downrating most of the pre-Yamato ships to a lower rating (eg; battleships to heavy cruisers).
@@clonetrooper8669 The largest ship of the Gamilan fleet, Earth called a super dreadnought, which strangely stuck after the war, whereas in the opening scenes of the Reboot, the Gamilan battleship that was there was called a dreadnought or super dreadnought by the Earth fleet. And the Yamato was about its size.
@@thomasgray4188 So settings do have dreadnoughts as a much heavier version to the battleship.
I actually like using the term "Dreadnought" for really big, impressive ships. Sure, its not historically accurate, but the name literally means "Fear Nothing"! and it sounds cool and impressive and fits the most imposing ship on screen.
As long as dreadnoughts in Scifi actually cause the Dreadnought Effect (see LazerPig's video on that for a hilarious explanation) im fine with the term. They simply need to change the game when they are first built because nothing else compares.
I say it's more badass for a specific ship or even a flag ship to be named "Dreadnought" than it be the name of a class. Besides, what's a Dreadnought if a much more powerful ship type is built?
@@adambrande The older, sad dreadnought ^_^
Two things of note. A Corvette is also known as a Destroyer escort. A Frigate is just another name for a Light Cruiser.
The line of ascension classification for ships are:
Patrol Craft
Corvette/Destroyer Escort
Destroyer
Heavy Destroyer (These are admittedly rare but the IJN Shimakaze was one notable one)
Light cruiser/Frigate
Cruiser
Heavy Cruiser
Battle Cruiser
Battleship
Super Battleship (Yamato and Musashi)
Light carrier (also called Jeep Carrier)
Fleet carrier
Super Carrier (only the USA has them)
What happens when a frigate replaces a smaller destroyer and a corvette takes on the job of a frigate?
And where would aircraft cruisers fit in?
Thanks for the clasification content.
I will say that the dreadnaught thing is the only naming trope that actually bothers me at all. I'm totally fine with whatever system a writer comes up with for their setting, but dreadnaughts is always the one that gets under my skin since it more signifies the time period of when the ship was built than the actual design of the ship itself. It only ever really gets used as a term during that period of overlap when people were still fielding large numbers of older "pre-dreadnaught" battleships that were extremely different to newer ships in their capabilities, then we just go back to calling them all battleships.
To be honest, following a bit on Drach's channel on regular warships, some definitions in the real world are also incredibly confusing, lol!