Illustrious

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Illustrious Class Carriers

   Jutland was founded as a shipyard support colony on a planet that could not support Earth life without significant terraforming.  The colony leaders decided to base their home defense upon light attack craft flying from 'Carriers'.  Little is known about the Illustrious class beyond a few simple facts:
   - The Illustrious design was based upon Central Command's "Presidential"-class carrier design, but it was significantly larger, carried more attack craft, and was more heavily armored.  The additional armor was seen as a necessary result of their home defense plan, since their fleet did not include any warships large enough and tough enough to defend the carriers from attack.  Ergo, the carriers had to either defend themselves, or survive attacks.
   - An Illustrious carried a standard load of 96 small craft divided into eight twelve-ship squadrons.  Depending upon operational tasking, the eight squadrons could be any mix of space superiority fighters, long-range anti-ship bombers, scouts, support or command ships, or ground-attack craft.
   - Jutland built more than fifty of this class.  We know that, when the Seventh Military District put out a call for ships to go rescue Earth from the Sa'arm after the disastrous Third and Fourth Battles of Earthat, Jutland contributed twenty-three carriers to the Brak- and Beerat-led Seventh Military District Combined Fleet which went to save Earth.
   By Jutland's home defense doctrine they would have retained at least three task forces for home defense, and each TF would have at least two 'divisions' with two carriers in each, for a minimum of twelve carriers kept back.  Further, over the next decade Jutland built at least thirty more for other colonies, merely insisting that the requesting colony provide the crews.  This gives us an absolute lower limit of 65 Illustrious carriers built at Jutland.

Hull Designation

   Central Command assigned the hull type code of "CVI" to the Illustrious class, starting with CVI-001 Illustrious.  Known Illustrious-Class ship names include:

• CVI-001 Illustrious
• Courageous - Heavily damaged in Third Battle of System Alpha

(Someday this will be a navigation template.  It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links.  Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))