Battlecruiser
Confederacy Battlecruisers
During the Swarm War, the Confederacy used three different designs frequently identified as "Battlecruisers". Each class was variously described as cruisers, battlecruisers, and sometimes as battleships. As all three were conceived as special-purpose designs, none of them were balanced general-purpose warships.
The Heroes had heavy artillery but no answer to massed attack by small craft while the Goddesses built at the same time at the same shipyard were proof against small craft attack but had no response to long-range heavy incoming fire. If they were always deployed in pairs they could have covered each others' weaknesses, but there were never enough hulls to allow that. As a result, their combat record made it clear that only balanced warships with primary, secondary, and point-defense systems could contribute and survive.
The eight Kongos later built by Beerat were all-big-gun developmental designs like the Heroes. They were experiments that could also be used in combat if needed. Just like the Heroes, they could stand up to the Sa'arm capital ships they met, but they were easily swarmed over by small craft carrying shipkiller missiles. The only reason more Kongos returned to base than Heroes was that Beerat and the 7th Military District provided them with an adequate screen of lighter warships and small craft.
The battlecruiser, or battle cruiser, was a type of capital ship of the first half of the 20th century. They were similar in displacement, armament and cost to battleships, but differed slightly in form and balance of attributes. Battlecruisers typically had slightly thinner armour and a lighter main gun battery than contemporary battleships, installed on a longer hull with much higher engine power in order to attain greater speeds. The first battlecruisers were designed in the United Kingdom in the first decade of the century, as a development of the armoured cruiser, at the same time as the dreadnought succeeded the pre-dreadnought battleship.
Just like the heavy frigates of the previous 'Age of Sail', the intent of the design was to outrun any ship with similar armament, and chase down any ship with lesser armament; they were intended to hunt down slower, older armoured cruisers and destroy them with heavy gunfire while avoiding combat with the more powerful but slower battleships. However, as more and more battlecruisers were built, they were increasingly used alongside the better-protected battleships.
Battlecruisers served in the navies of the UK, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, Australia and Japan during World War I, most notably at the Battle of the Falkland Islands and in the several raids and skirmishes in the North Sea which culminated in the war's only fleet battle, the Battle of Jutland. British battlecruisers in particular suffered heavy losses at Jutland, where their crews' poor fire safety and ammunition handling practices left them vulnerable to catastrophic magazine explosions following hits to their main turrets from large-calibre shells. This dismal showing led to a persistent general belief that battlecruisers were too thinly armoured to function successfully.
By the end of the war, capital ship design had developed, with battleships becoming faster and battlecruisers becoming more heavily armoured, blurring the distinction between a battlecruiser and a fast battleship. The Washington Naval Treaty, which limited capital ship construction from 1922 onwards, treated battleships and battlecruisers identically, and the new generation of battlecruisers planned was scrapped under the terms of the treaty.
Improvements in armor design and propulsion created the 1930s "fast battleship" with the speed of a battlecruiser and armor of a battleship, making the battlecruiser in the traditional sense effectively an obsolete concept. Thus from the 1930s on, only the Royal Navy continued to use "battlecruiser" as a classification for the World War I–era capital ships that remained in the fleet. While Japan's battlecruisers remained in service, they had been significantly reconstructed and were re-rated as full-fledged fast battleships.
Battlecruisers were put into action again during World War II, and only one survived to the end. There was also renewed interest in large "cruiser-killer" type warships, but few were ever begun, as construction of battleships and battlecruisers was curtailed in favor of more-needed convoy escorts, aircraft carriers, and cargo ships. In the post–Cold War era, the Soviet Kirov class of large guided missile cruisers have also been termed "battlecruisers".
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