[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Black Wolf
Personally, I put Frigates between corvette and destroyer (think Iceni).

I think that's the general consensus.

[Striker]

Yeah I made a booboo. YOu also should take into accont firepower.

[Striker]

EDIT: double post

[Admiral Nelson]

FWIW for a time many US ships were classified as 'frigates' (DLG). This began in the 50s and ended in 1975, when all frigates were reclassed as cruisers or destroyers.

The Hippocrates class is also called a 'frigate' in ships.tbl.

[StratComm]

The mesh is called frigate, but it's classed a cruiser to the game (thus you being able to destroy it with fighter weapons) and I really think the "frigate" name is an obscure Star Wars reference rather than the inclusion of a new class.  It's probably no coincidence that it looks a bit like a Nebulon-B.  The only other instance of "frigate" in the FS2 tables is in the Iceni's tech description, though it's refered to as a corvette in the campaign.  My take on "frigate" in Freespace is that the term is used for any medium-sized ship used for a dedicated purpose besides combat (medical frigate, command frigate, etc) regardless of size or firepower.  It's something that everyone loves to argue about.  As for the rest of the designations,  well there's a relevant post on web-archive for the VBB that quotes a previous post (since lost):
http://web.archive.org/web/20010414172541/vbb.volition-inc.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/013149.html
See the second post in that thread.

It wasn't by accident, it wasn't by ignorance, but rather it was a deliberate deviation from normal conventions, and I guess now no one knows why.  But saying "V screwed up" is completely incorrect.

[Kosh]

Inferno also changed this. Now we have dedicated carriers, freeing up destroyers for major assaults (and losing one is no longer a complete disaster, only a major loss).

[StratComm]

Bah, no offense to the Inferno crew, but R1 v1 was the uncanon of the uncanon.  And with a new version coming, anything from the old R1 is questionable.

If you really want to rationalize it the class system, you could say that early in the T-V war neither side posessed anything larger than a cruiser.  Maybe they didn't have the resources to build anything bigger, maybe it was a technology thing, who knows.  So they [the terrans] classes their newly christened Fenris a "Cruiser" because it is similar in size to a modern-day (and presumably future) surface cruiser.  Great, name makes sense.  Then Terran Command decides to build something that will put cruisers to shame, the Orion.  Yay.  Big.  But what do they call it?  It's not a dedicated carrier, so that won't do.  Battleship?  Too tied to ancient history, so that's out.  Plus it has a hanger and supports strike craft.  Perhaps they also decide that no viable space-faring warship frame will ever be build significantly smaller than a cruiser without becoming a strike craft and so everything below "cruiser" designation cannot viably be used in it's "proper" place.  So command adopts the term Destroyer to their new behemoths, and the name sticks.  By the time Corvette classes showed up, it was plainly evident that neither cruisers nor destroyers were going away, so they assigned a new class to it (smaller than a destroyer) and chose Corvette.  Enter FS2.

Now I've never liked refering to supercapital class ships as "Juggernauts" as the term strikes me as being very un-military like.  I prefer to call them Dreadnauts simply because it still sounds unbelievably powerful, but not stupid.  I know it was never really a class, but that's not really an argument given the assumptions stated above.  And Dreadnaught is a valid spelling, by the way:
Dictionary.com
dreadnaught

n : battleship that has big guns all of the same caliber [syn: dreadnought]

dreadnought

n : battleship that has big guns all of the same caliber [syn: dreadnaught]

[Spidey-]

yeah, i like how [V] did the ship classes in FS. And frankly it's completely reasonable i mean it's
a)sci-fi, you can do whatever you wan't
b)it's a game, so what sounds cool goes
c)it is possible, as already stated

btw i say Battlecruiser sounds better than Dreadnaught. it just sounds sleeker, but just as deadly

[StratComm]

But then you run into confusion with cruisers, as by technical definition a battlecruiser is an overgunned cruiser.  And it's got the unfortunate side effect of being associated with a very, very bad game.

[Spidey-]

well, i guess it can be confusing if you're very aware of modern classes... lol kinda glad i'm a bit ignorant in this area

but anyways, it's like learning a new set of controls and besides, you can see how big it is and how heavily armed it is when it's in your face. also, i tend to pay attention to the designation instead of the class

[Akalabeth Angel]

When I hear Battlecruiser I think HMS Hood, not BC-3000 or whatever it is you're refering to. I agree with some of what has been said, class doesn't matter, just use what sounds cool.


Designations change from era to era, in the age of sail a Frigate was top of the line or close to. Nowadays a frigate is a pretty minor vessel. Whose to say what it'll be in however many years?

Freespace isn't the first to do such things either, Babylon 5 has Omega Destroyers and the smaller Hyperion Heavy Cruisers. Star Wars has Star Destroyers. I personally think that FS was thinking along the lines of the latter myself.

[Spidey-]

ewwww BC-3000???
I'm talking about the Higgaran Battlecruiser man!

[Akalabeth Angel]

I dunno . . . I'm not up to date with games as my computer doesn't run a lot of them. The most recent game I have is GTA3 and the most recent one I played aside from freespace was Ultima5. Yipee.

I've never even heard of "Higgaran Battlecruiser"??

[StratComm]

It's a homeworld2 reference.  In Homeworld 1 the largest ships were Heavy Cruisers (Dreadnaughts, incidentally, in HW:Cataclysm) and Battlecruisers in Homeworld 2.

[NGTM-1R]

Which really sucked...the game as a whole, not the ship.

But anyways, the term "destroyer" was NOT the original name of destroyers as we know them today.

Destroyers were originally two seperate classes: either the "torpedo-boat destroyer", meant to protect your big ships against those tiny ships that launched those pesky newfangled devices that punch holes beneath the waterline, or "battleship destroyer", as they were meant to launch those pesky newfangled devices that punched holes beneath the waterline. Eventually the two functions were combined into one ship, and the name was shortened to just "destroyer".

I think what happened in the Freespace universe is roughly similar. The first large combatant craft were called cruisers, because they were similar in size and function to cruisers as we know them. Then someone developed a ship meant to waltz in and blow your cruiser group to Kingdom Come, and they called it a "cruiser destroyer", which was eventually shortened to just "destroyer".
Then people started developing intermediate classes, and needing new names for them, turned to classic descriptions of classes, and called their new overgrown cruisers "corvettes", and their new scaled-down destroyers "frigates".

I also think the carrier concept is somewhat off. The FS destroyer is, in many ways, a tactician's dream: it can carry a significant fighter force, and yet it remains both defensively and offensively powerful even without those fighters. This is the kind of ship everyone wishes they had, because it doesn't require the kind of escort a dedicated carrier does, and can fight on effectively even if most of its air group (or in FS, aerospace group) is destroyed.

[Kosh]

And with a new version coming, anything from the old R1 is questionable.

There still will be carriers, but they will be somewhat weakend. The same principle remains.

I also think the carrier concept is somewhat off. The FS destroyer is, in many ways, a tactician's dream:

But it obviously didn't work well enough against the Shivans. The Destroyers in INF are there for one purpose: To provide lots of very big guns. Making something like that your fleet command center is not a good idea, IMO. This is because you are reluctant to use it (or else you would risk losing it), but then you rob your fleet of some serious firepower.

[aldo_14]

Worth remembering that FS is a space, not naval fleet.  Why should it match the naval equivalent, anyways?

[Ghostavo]

Kosh, of course it didn't work against the shivans... they have numeric, technological, and size superiority... go read what Sun Tzu says when you are outnumbered 10 to 1...

The FS destroyer works very much like the HW2's Battlecruiser instead of the carrier, it can carry fighters and bombers and stuff, while possessing a massive armament. I don't want to get into a pure carrier vs hybrid discussion again (see old thread about it), but the thing is in any military decision you can never be reluctant, you either commit yourself or you don't. If you just enter half-way you are a gonner. The destruction of a major ship will always be a major loss/disaster, be it carrier, destroyer, or hybrid. You lose something that you spent years building.

[magatsu1]

Originally posted by Kosh
But it obviously didn't work well enough against the Shivans.  

actually, up to and including Corvette class the Alliance wasn't doing too badly. It's just Destroyers and Jugs where the GTVA suffers. Well, untill they learn how to do simple flanking manouvers that is..

[NGTM-1R]

The problem with fighting the Shivans is that they're too good at tactical placement of their ships in a subspace jump. They always appear right where they can bring their whole main armament to bear on you. This is not necessarily the case with GTVA ships.

As for flanking manuvers...one of my most burning questions about "High Noon" was why the GTVA didn't park the Colossus BEHIND the node, then go for the Sathanas' engines with beam fire so it didn't get the chance to turn around.
It really is kinda sad, though, that if you had a sharp captain, you could probably take down a Sathanas with a Leviathan by parking yourself above him and manuvering to stay there. It would take awhile, but you could.