Warship Generations
Confederacy Warship Generations During the Early Phases of the Swarm War
The "Hand-Me-Downs"
The Hand-Me-Down ships can be thought of as the "zeroth" generation of warships. Using the lessons we learned by modifying, using, and building copies of the ships we were given, we designed our first set of "real" warships, the "First Generation" designs.
Early stabs at shipbuilding
- Ainsworth corvettes (really just improved Castles)
- Sir Lancelot troopships (Modified Auroras, maybe via the Styx class shuttles)
- Small Craft Styx Hyper-shuttles (expanded regular 32-pax shuttles, 1/3 larger, same engines, roughly 2x the mass so half the accel, 2 decks of 6x12 pax if no cargo so 144 pax)
First Generation Warships
The Europas came first, and rather than straight warships they were multi-purpose ships, built to fight, yes, but they were developmental platforms and were also experiments and schoolships. The Africas and Asians were parallel developments built as cheaper escorts for the more expensive cruisers. The Asians were a smaller multirole version of the Europas, while the Africas were strictly a defensive escort with a devastating but short-range punch.
All of them had design compromises due to their multiple roles. As soon as these were on the ways being built, we started designing our next set of improved warships, the "Second Generation" designs.
Second Generation Warships
- Shiro large corvettes or light destroyers
- Raptor large strike cruisers
- Goddess large escort cruisers
- Semmes large missile cruisers
- Tarawa assault ships - Our first CMC landing ships
- Hero heavy or "assault" cruisers
- Presidential light attack craft (LAC) carriers
- Midway CMC Close Support carriers
- (various small craft - landers, fighters, bombers)
We learned a lot building our 1G ships, and even more from using them. All of the 2G ships were as much improved over the 1G ships as the 1G ships were over the hand-me-downs. However, actual use in the field showed that even our 2G ships had their flaws -and the Sa'arm were quick to find and exploit them.
The Raptors and Heros had devastating long-range weapons, but they had nothing which could home on a maneuvering target so they could be easily overwhelmed by small craft, while the Goddesses could deal with small craft but were very susceptible to long-range weaponry. The Midways and Tarawas were expected to get shot at by ground weapons so they had the armor to survive being slowly chewed up, but not the armor needed to survive concentrated fire by the massed heavy weapons carried by the larger Sa'arm ships. The Shiros, Semmes, and Presidents, of course, were special-purpose units never intended to get in slugging matches with the larger Sa'arm ships and they didn't fare well when they got cornered by them.
Third Generation Warships
(A wide assortment of ships, built mostly in the colonies as CC stayed with the tried and true 1G and 2G classes they had developed)
- Archerfish stealth attack craft from Atlantis?
- Shiro II small destroyers from Beerat
- Atlanta escort cruisers from Beerat
- Kent heavy cruisers from Beerat
- Snake assault cruisers from Beerat
- Illustrious attack carriers from Jutland
Fourth Generation Warships
- Archerfish-II stealth attack craft from Atlantis?
- Kongo battlecruisers from Beerat
- Vesuvius battleships from Beerat
(Einstein3 has "5 Emperor BCs and 15 Sirius cruisers built at Mars...to Einstein." I'm gonna assume that the Emperors are improved Kongos and the Sirius are improved Kents. To a layman they will all look the same, but they will be mostly built in Earthat space and their designs will reflect the expectations of larger crews due to the relative ease of manning them.)
Discussion
*We could use some timeline references here. I'm not sure all ship development was so linear, with independent and disjointed development happening." (It would be better to say that ship development _was_ linear, but in many different parallel lines all started at different times and with different priorities and resources. Each colony built what its leaders thought was best for their particular circumstances. -ZM)
See Also
(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))
