Presidential

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Presidential Class Attack Small-Craft Carriers

   Following the far from stellar result of earlier attempts to modify existing ships to carry fighters the Presidential class was designed and built as a small-craft carrier.  The design was based on the Hero, though.  Complement is six squadrons of twelve fighters each, either A-28 Attack Fighters or F-104 Space Superiority fighters,  Exact squadron mix is by mission.  Weighing in at 200,000 tons and 450 meters long, they easily replaced the Hero as the largest ships in the Confederacy Navy.

ssigned Ships and Hull Numbers

• CVA001 George Washington
• CVA002 Winston S. Churchill
• CVA003 John Adams
• CVA004 Margaret Thatcher Destroyed year 14, 3rd Earthat
• CVA005 Thomas Jefferson
• CVA006 Andrew Jackson
• CVA007 Abraham Lincoln
• CVA008 Duke of Wellington
• CVA009 Ulysses S. Grant
• CVA010 Theodore Roosevelt
• CVA011 David Lloyd George
• CVA012 Franklin D. Roosevelt
• CVA013 Harry S. Truman
• CVA014 William Pitt - Borneo Military District
• CVA015 Dwight D. Eisenhower
• CVA016 John F. Kennedy Destroyed year 14, 3rd Earthat
• CVA017 Anthony Blair
• CVA018 Lyndon B. Johnson
• CVA019 Ronald Reagan
• CVA020 George H. W. Bush
• CVA021 Sir Robert Peel
• CVA022 Benjamin Disraeli - Built in Spindrift shipyards, Heimdall Military District, based out of Heimdall; Heavily damaged year 14, 3rd Earthat; Destroyed year 14 4th Earthat
• CVA023 William Ewart Gladstone
• CVA024 Stanley Baldwin
• CVA025 Ramsay MacDonald
• CVA026 Harold Wilson

Named but not numbered:

• Howland (Ishtar Investigation)
• Martin Van Buren (A Shepherd No More)

   In addition, two Presidential Class were heavily modified by Central Command for use as command ships.  From "The Ishtar Investigation": "They stripped out the fighters and the support equipment and used the space to install offices for the various commands.  It allows them to travel to other planets when necessary.  Also it means they can jump from the Earth system when the Sa'arm finally arrive.  Leaving any Confederacy technology behind for the Sa'arm to find is a major worry for High Command as its been proved that the Sa'arm are masters at converting captured technology to their own purposes."

• CVC001 Victory - Navy mobile command post
  
• CVC002 Success - Marine mobile command post; also DECO until that organization got their own cube ship
  

Design Notes

   For almost a decade, the Presidential Class of small-craft carriers were our largest combat units.  The Presidents were a startling departure from our previous progression from smaller and less-capable warships to larger ships, carrying more armor and larger weapons that could hit from farther away and do more damage than their predecessors.  Both sides of the conflict had developed armed small craft.  The Sa'arm small craft were armed with weapons that could cripple even our largest ships with one hit, or completely destroy our smaller ships, forcing us to develop a weapon system to counter them.  We needed something that could carry our space-fighters, our small craft which could destroy the Sa'arm bombers before the bombers could get within launch range of our ships.
   It can't easily be seen from the outside, but it is clear from the drawings that, rather than start from scratch, the Hero design was modified for this use.  If a Hero-class Assault Cruiser is cut apart two decks above the central railgun cavity, the lower part, almost 60,000 tons mass, is immediately recognizable from the drawings as the lower hull -or the upper hull- of a President.  Two of these hulls, when the two cut surfaces are mated by four decks of hangars, elevators, shops, berthing, and offices, comprise the basic hull of a President.  The appearance differences visible on the outside are due to the ship's different role as a mothership for small craft.
   The hangar spaces in the center of the ship were divided into four independent hangars: upper forward, lower forward, upper aft and lower aft.  The two forward hangars had three 'fly-in/fly-out' openings, one in the bow and one on each side, protected by both force fields and armored blast doors.  As a matter of policy the bow openings were usually designated for launch only, while the two side openings were used for landings only.  Since launches could be controlled more closely than landings, having one launch site and two landing sites worked well for continuous operations.  The two aft hangars were designed the same way, but the aft openings could not be used underway due to interference from the ship's main propulsion systems.  Normally, the two side openings in the aft hangars were used for landings while craft ready for space were taken by elevators to the two catapults for launch.
   The forward and aft hangars were linked by three airlocks on each level, each one large enough to hold two F-104s, the design craft for the class.  The upper and lower hangars were linked by four elevators in the corners, each large enough to hold four F-104s.  These linked the hangars with each other and the maintenance spaces above and below them and, for the aft hangars, with the ready rooms for the launch catapults.  In combat, this meant that the aft hangars would be vented and opened to space for landings, while the forward hangars were kept pressurized and relegated to maintenance.  All fighters were cycled through launch by the catapult, combat, landing in the aft hangars, support (including crew changeout and/or diversion to a shop or a forward hangar if needed), transfer to a catapult, and launch again.  All of the spacecraft airlocks and elevators could be sealed and served double-duty as replicators.
   In the Presidents, the central railgun cavities in the upper and lower hulls have been repurposed as a small-craft launcher or catapult.  It's still a railgun, but the ammunition is now a far larger 'projectile' that weighs far more and is almost infinitely more fragile.  The F-104 and the Presidential Class were developed together, to ensure that the ship could carry and launch the craft and that the fighter was small enough to fit.  The acceleration has been cut back to where the small craft -and pilot- can survive the launch, and while the total energy per shot is roughly the same it has been spread out over a much longer time and the immense ring capacitors are no longer needed.
   The magazines, ring capacitors, and power management spaces surrounding the railguns have all been redesigned as ready storage for small craft to be launched.  Each catapult has a 'ready room' on each side large enough to hold an entire 12-ship squadron of fighters ready to be fed into the catapult.  A well-tuned catapult crew could position, hook up, and launch a warplane every 10 seconds, and if both the upper and lower catapults were in use they could alternate to allow the ship to launch something every 5 seconds.  If everyone was ready, and everyone knew what they were doing, the catapults could easily stay ahead of the elevators bringing more fighters from the hangars.  From this, Central Command's reluctance to replace their early fighters with more advanced craft is easy to see.  All of the newer craft are simply too big for the available launch tubes and would cut down on the numbers that could be carried anyway.

   This was later recognized as one of the proximate causes of our losses in the 3rd and 4th Battles of Earthat.  By the time of these battles, the Carrier Wings had been revised to include the A-28 Attack Fighter, a small platform designed to meet the dual needs of launching a ship-killing torpedo and fitting into our carriers.  Our Moonbases had hundreds of F-105 Star Arrows, but they could not be used until the Sa'arm invasion fleets neared the Moon.  Our carriers could intercept the Sa'arm much further out, but they could not launch the F-105 and the earlier craft they could carry were far less effective.
   It has been postulated that if the aft hangars had been spotted for rapid launch of the normal Wing and the forward hangars had simply been crammed full of F-105s positioned for fly-out, each carrier could have gone into combat with its full standard complement as well as four complete squadrons of F-105s.  This could have made a significant difference in the two battles.  12 Squadrons of F-105s committed early in the 3rd battle should have translated into far more of our ships surviving.  This, in turn, would have meant far more ships available for the 4th battle, giving us a better chance of winning that.
   Each upper and lower hull retained the Hero-class engineering layout and equipment, so the Presidents had four separate propulsion plants as well as four power rooms.  With 3 times the mass of a Hero but only twice the power, the Presidents were far more dignified in maneuvering but they could keep up with the new battle-line as long as no one went to max military power.

Defenses

   Since doctrine included the belief that the embarked Wing's Combat Space Patrol (CSP) would protect the ship, conventional armament was almost an afterthought.  As built, the first flight of Presidents left the yards with 16 twin Light Particle Beam turrets as their primary conventional weapons.  For close-in defense, each ship carried 8 Point-Defense Railguns and 8 Point-Defense Lasers.  These mounts were positioned to allow multiple weapons to cover every direction.
   All of the Presidents gained additional defensive mounts through the years, with PDRs and PDLs getting installed everywhere they wouldn't interfere with navigation, propulsion, or flight ops.  Like most other classes, when the “StarSparrow” bomber-defense missile system was developed it was common for half of the PDRs and half of the PDLs to be replaced with StarSparrow mounts.
   Armor was always considered substandard, but this was forced by our need to get the platforms out.  Since the first 20 built were constructed from hulls partially built from the last 40 Heros to be laid down, design compromises in the Hero class had to be simply accepted.  What was worse, the need to have large openings for flight operations from the hangars left the ships with 12 huge openings in the hull.  These were all covered by blast doors, but the doors had to be left open in combat to support the fighters.
   A large part of the design's mass was internal armor, but it was impossible to provide adequate separation between the four hangars.  It was demonstrated several times that a single Sa'arm Plasma Torpedo entering a hangar would take the entire ship out of the fight.  It may not be destroyed, but it was no longer a functional Carrier and if the fighters were needed for the current campaign then the loss of the hangars meant the loss of the battle.
   The Sa'arm were quick to learn this lesson.  Once the Presidents appeared in our fleets, they were always priority targets.  This may have been simply because of their size, massing more than twice our next-largest ships, but it must be accepted that it may have been because of what they did.

Manning Notes

   The USN aircraft carriers that provided the concept for our first "Space Carriers" had three sets of people working onboard.  First, there was the core crew of the ship itself.  The Captain and bridge crew, the Engineering gang, the cooks, the laundry, the communications personnel and all similar tasks had their analogues on the Space Carriers.  Some tasks became automated, and an increasing number of them were done by concubines, but many of the tasks still had to be done by people the AIs trusted.
   Next, there were the Air Wings down on Earth, and their analogue Space Wings on the Presidents.  These included the pilots, crew chiefs, ground crew, and overhead staff like the flight controllers and fuel testers.
   The third group of personnel was the Aircraft Intermediate Maintenance Detachment, or AIMD.  In the US Navy, each carrier -or any ship capable of flight operations for that matter- had spaces set aside for aircraft maintenance, and personnel were assigned to the ship's AIMD as needed for the aircraft expected.
   A destroyer with no assigned aircraft but expected to have helicopters land on the aft pad would have two or three men assigned to the DD's Air Operations Department.  One would be a ground control specialist and he would train and lead the team of deck seamen who secured any helo which landed and helped load or unload it.  Another would probably be a fuels expert with some training in armament.  He would usually work with the ship's engineering crew, since the ship's gas turbine engines used the same fuel as the helo's gas turbine engines.  The Air Operations team would be led by a senior enlisted or junior officer who was qualified to act a Flight Controller and would manage the airspace around the ship.
   A carrier, on the other hand, would have hundreds of men assigned to its AIMD and the department's shops would be capable of any sort of field repair from engine replacement to radar calibration.
   The Confederacy Navy took many concepts from the US Navy, but they all got modified for the differing circumstances.  One big change was that the SIMDs -Spacecraft Intermediate Maintenance Departments- were not considered part of the ship's crew but rather were considered part of the Space Wing being hosted aboard.  If there was no Wing onboard, the SIMD spaces would be secured as not in use.  The personnel who would man the SIMD spaces and maintain all the fighters and bombers would come aboard with the rest of the Wing's support personnel.

Timeline Appearances

Story appearances in stories with identified timeline placement
Month 30 in Destination Azahar
Month 33 in A Shepherd No More
Month 45 in In Loco Parentis
Month 164 in Ending This Mess

See Also

• Carrier
• Warships

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