[Colonol Dekker]

Pound for pound, a carrier is more effective than a battleship of equivalent displpacement,

Modern carriers
 
HMS HermesMore modern uses of aircraft carriers include the Falklands War, where the United Kingdom was able to win a conflict 8,000 miles (13,000 km) from home in large part due to the use of the full size carrier HMS Hermes and the smaller HMS Invincible. The Falklands showed the value of a VSTOL aircraft—the Hawker-Siddeley Harrier (the RN Sea Harrier and press-ganged RAF Harriers) in defending the fleet and assault force from shore based aircraft and for attacking the enemy. Helicopters from the carriers were used to deploy troops and pick up the wounded.

The US has also made use of carriers in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and to protect its interests in the Pacific. Most recently, the 2003 invasion of Iraq featured US aircraft carriers as the primary base of US air power. Even without the ability to place significant numbers of aircraft in Middle Eastern airbases, the United States was capable of carrying out significant air attacks from carrier-based squadrons.

In the early 21st century, worldwide aircraft carriers were capable of carrying about 1250 aircraft. US carriers accounted for over 1000 of these; the second leading country, the United Kingdom fielded over 50 aircraft. The United Kingdom and France are both undergoing a major expansion in carrier capability (with a common ship class), but the United States will still maintain a very large lead.

[Fergus]

A dedicated carrier has to be defended by other ships.
Even in WW2 - where you couldn't jump in and get close personal - carriers were protected by battelships, cruisers, frigates & destroyers.

While part of hte battlegroup could be split to do a differnt task, the carrier was never left without ample defenses.

Perhaps, but how many times has the all-mighty Alpha 1 been sent in with a handful of fighters to protect what is an undefended Destroyer?  It's something of a staple of the series if you ask me, anyway, I think we're getting slightly away from the whole Fenris area.
Personally, I think they do as a stop-gap in the GTVA fleet.  It makes sense that most of the Fenris' we see in the FS2 campaign belong to the NTF as most of thier vessels were ex-mothballs from Polaris (not entirely sure on the location), and so would have needed to use them much more.  I very, very much doubt that the GTVA would rely on the Fenris in any great quantity, especially after seeing the devestating power of the new-improved Shivan bombers in the FS2 campaign.

[Colonol Dekker]

All very valid, i reckon :V: gave NTF mostly Gret war era/just post great war (think silent threat) gear, just to give them their own feel. The true terran fleet if you will.

Anyway where were we, "so an Aten can whoop a Fenris" i heard someone say?

[aldo_14]

A dedicated carrier has to be defended by other ships.
Even in WW2 - where you couldn't jump in and get close personal - carriers were protected by battelships, cruisers, frigates & destroyers.

While part of hte battlegroup could be split to do a differnt task, the carrier was never left without ample defenses.

The carrier - the FS2 carrier - isn't all that short of AAAf, flak, etc defenses to protect and defend it until it can escape, though, and is certainly better armed than a modern aircraft carrier for precisely the reason that enemies can jump in.  It's simply not invincible, of course.

If the GTVA had high resources, undoubtedly there'd be more close support for a destroyer/carrier; equally so, it's evident they don't, or at the very least consider the 'risk' of a destroyer being ambushed and destroyed before it can jump away to be low in comparison to the relative gain of a wider general fleet coverage area.  Of course, the more precise - and dangerous - we assume attackers jumps in to be, the more you have to group vessels together to defend against all sides of attack; and the more you reduce the general battlefield effectiveness of those escortsin doing so.

[Colonol Dekker]

We gotta bear in mind, that 2K long ships dont just get buiult overnight, For all we know a deimos even small ships could tak anything up to 2 years to complete. Taking relevant reallife counterparts as examples. (Although zero g might make it slightly easier, It wouldnt scale down cosntruction time to months)

[Ghostavo]

IIRC the FRED walkthrough (if it can be taken as canon) has the time it took to built the orion class destroyer which takes part in it, and again IIRC I think it's 3 years.

[aldo_14]

Heh, I've deleted my data folder so many times I'd forgotten there was a walkthrough

[Mars]

I don't know if that could be considered canon.

[AlphaOne]

That is a big negative on the Construction time! If that was the case then we could asume that the more modern ships in FS2 take evn more to complete then theyr predecesors which have rouled out any bugs and stuff like that making them acustomed to the problems of designs and the solutions. Thus a hecate would take like what 4 years on the minimum?? No that would make it imposible for the GTVA to build both the Hatsheepsut and the Hecate in at least 2 exemplaries by the time the second shivan incurshion takes place. Remember they were introduced into srvice shortly after the start of the war. And you would imagine them having more then 2 of each if they really want to phase out the Orion.

[Mars]

Well, no, maybe that's an advantage of modern ships. Maybe the Hecate can be constructed faster then the Orion, we don't know, and the only canon value on that is that the Colossus took 20 years to construct, but it's twelve times the size of a Lucifer, so somthing like a Deimos could probably be constructed in 6 months to a year by one Ganymede, so multiple corvettes could be constructed at once.

[aldo_14]

That is a big negative on the Construction time! If that was the case then we could asume that the more modern ships in FS2 take evn more to complete then theyr predecesors which have rouled out any bugs and stuff like that making them acustomed to the problems of designs and the solutions. Thus a hecate would take like what 4 years on the minimum?? No that would make it imposible for the GTVA to build both the Hatsheepsut and the Hecate in at least 2 exemplaries by the time the second shivan incurshion takes place. Remember they were introduced into srvice shortly after the start of the war. And you would imagine them having more then 2 of each if they really want to phase out the Orion.

Exemplaries?  I'm not sure what that means, but there is no date given for either ships inception (although being introduced to service is entirely different from completing the design and beginning construction), and there is also no reason for building time having to increase, particularly in light of likely improvements in such things as mass-manufacture, mining, etc that could be anticiapted over 60 years or so.

Additionally, they can actually build more than one ship at once. 

[AlphaOne]

Yeah but that would still be too much construction time! i mean they could build like what 3 or 4 corvettes bi the time they finish one destroyer? Then we weould actualy have to see like what for every destroyer in the game 3 pr 4 time that amount of corvettes. And we dont see that!

[aldo_14]

Yeah but that would still be too much construction time! i mean they could build like what 3 or 4 corvettes bi the time they finish one destroyer? Then we weould actualy have to see like what for every destroyer in the game 3 pr 4 time that amount of corvettes. And we dont see that!

Where are you getting these random times from?  There's no reason for manufacturing times to be linear.

There doesn't have to be one corvette-yard to one destroyer-yard, you know.

A quick glance at http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Freespace_2_Terran_Ship_Database#GTC_Zanthar reveals 15 corvettes and 2 Hecate class destroyers.

[Mars]

Granted half of them were destroyed. Yeah, GTVA has definitely been churning out Deimos corvettes.

[AlphaOne]

umm and how many Sobeks and Hatsheepsut's???? I imagine them as havin a lot more then that! Since there was an old thread somewhere that said something like 26 destroyers in total in the entire GTVA(terrans=13,vasudans=13 ) !

[aldo_14]

15 Sobeks, 5 Hatshepsuts.

http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Freespace_2_Vasudan_Ship_Database#GVC_Khevtoth

[Mars]

15 Sobeks, 5 Hatshepsuts.

http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Freespace_2_Vasudan_Ship_Database#GVC_Khevtoth

That's just the ones the player saw

umm and how many Sobeks and Hatsheepsut's???? I imagine them as havin a lot more then that! Since there was an old thread somewhere that said something like 26 destroyers in total in the entire GTVA(terrans=13,vasudans=13 ) !

We know that there are 26 Battlegroups in the GTVA from the Hornet tech description, and we know that the 3rd and 11th Battle Groups had multiple destroyers (GTD Delecroix, GVD Memphis) so there are more destroyers than 26, or not every battle group has a destroyer (unlikely, why would a fleet without a destroyer, and therefore, without fighters, need Hornets?)

[AlphaOne]

Then that would make them having say 2 destroyers per fleet/battlegroup average this is an average number of destroyers per fleet! Then take into consideration something like 2 corvettes per destroyer and at least that many cruisers and we have a huge fleet! Sure its small ompared to what the shivans can mount and considering that you can not send every ship you have to attack the enemy.

But still that is quite an impresive fleet! Also we see the NTF as having 2 Hecate's this would sugest that there are a lot more the just 4 of them as seen in the game.

I would bet they have something like at least 10 Hecates the rest of them beeing the aging Orion class while the Vasudans would have more of the Hatsheepsut class ones since they really don have that many Typhoon left! And we would see the GTVA as building more of the Hatsheepsut cass in order to overcome this shortcoming of the vasudans. However the vasudans i would suspect have a lot more corvettes then the terrans since they came into service before the Deimos!

[Mars]

Well, there's no canon evidence of the NTF having Hecates.

[aldo_14]

15 Sobeks, 5 Hatshepsuts.

http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Freespace_2_Vasudan_Ship_Database#GVC_Khevtoth

That's just the ones the player saw

Yes, but it is the only representative we have of the composition of a combat-operating GTVA group.

umm and how many Sobeks and Hatsheepsut's???? I imagine them as havin a lot more then that! Since there was an old thread somewhere that said something like 26 destroyers in total in the entire GTVA(terrans=13,vasudans=13 ) !

We know that there are 26 Battlegroups in the GTVA from the Hornet tech description, and we know that the 3rd and 11th Battle Groups had multiple destroyers (GTD Delecroix, GVD Memphis) so there are more destroyers than 26, or not every battle group has a destroyer (unlikely, why would a fleet without a destroyer, and therefore, without fighters, need Hornets?)

We don't know the composition or nature of a battlegroup, though.  For one thing, there could be support and logistics fleets, or fleets in minor sectors could only habe a small composition of small capships and rely on installation fighter support.  Also, we don't know there are 13 battlegroups per-species (there's no reason why there can't be 13 in total across the GTVA), or that battlegroup has the same meaning as 'fleet' (it could be a more fluid concept based on operational assignment; certainly the Actium and Lysander are described as being assigned to the Aquitanes battle group - small caps - which could imply that it exists in an operational timeframe).

Oh, and the Hornet certainly does not prove 26 battlegroups in any case;
After hostilities ceased, the GTVA found itself with an inventory of 2.6 million Hornet missiles. This stockpile has been spread among all GTVA battle groups, with each receiving at least 100,000 Hornets