
On the Taxonomy of Spaceships - mproud
http://criticalshit.org/2015/05/15/on-the-taxonomy-of-spaceships/
======
jeffbr13
This is awesome. I spent far too many hours as a kid orchestrating imaginary
space-battles based on the ships from Homeworld[1], also closely considering
the specialised roles and hierarchy of the ships as presented in that world.

Since then, reading the "Essay on Realistic Space Combat"[2] took a lot out of
the fun of those sorts of considerations, as you realise that actual space
combat would be more like relativistic cold wars and sudden genocide[3] than
the dashing image of privateering and admiralty fleet manoeuvres.

1:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeworld](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeworld)
2: [http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/essay-on-realistic-
sp...](http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/essay-on-realistic-space-combat-
i-wrote.131056/) 3: [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/04/on-
the-g...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/04/on-the-great-
filter-existentia.html)

~~~
mattmanser
Reading the 3rd one, it goes into the realm of silliness after the first half.
It's written by a fantasist, not a realist.

Alien griefers that act as a united grief and yet no other civilaztion
realises what's happening and gets rid of these robots?

It just smacks of not thinking it through.

It's like the constant terrorist threat we're apparently under. If it's so
threatening, why does it hardly ever materialise, and usually materialise as
utter failure.

I'm far more likely to believe that in a civilaztion's golden age everyone
retreats to ultimate VR fantasies that are so much better than reality that no
effort is made to expand.

That I can believe.

------
zyxley
On this note, one of the few scifi book series I've seen that play up the
distinctions between ship types are the Lost Fleet books:
[http://www.amazon.com/Dauntless-The-Lost-Fleet-
Book/dp/04410...](http://www.amazon.com/Dauntless-The-Lost-Fleet-
Book/dp/0441014186)

They're not high literature by any means, but they're entertaining books, and
the author clearly knows his stuff when it comes to military tactics and
maneuvering. Screening elements and fleet composition are the only thing that
prevent defeat in several cases, auxiliary repair ships are vitally important,
etc.

By contrast, there's books like the Honor Harrington series, where larger
ships are superior to smaller ones in every possible way and nobody ever
worries about the cost of restocking missiles despite firing off thousands of
them in every engagement.

~~~
Vendan
The later books in the series actually reversed the light ships are useless
idea, with the end result of the lightest ships in-universe being able to take
on some higher end ships. In addition, there's peculiarities in the HH series
that preclude direct comparison, i.e. impeller wedges are practically
invulnerable. I, personally, find the series to be well designed and thought
out. BTW, it is mentioned multiple times that restocking missiles is
expensive, and that the navy is using live missiles in exercises against the
wishes of the accountants, but they _are_ on a war footing most of the time,
and generally, when people are shooting at you, the fact that you are using
money by shooting back doesn't really come into play at all.

~~~
zyxley
> impeller wedges are practically invulnerable

This starts out important, but as the series goes on gets more and more
forgotten about, to the point where some large-scale battles are _literally_
skipped over entirely with a scene jump straight to "the main character
completely blew up the enemy fleet and took no casualties at all because
reasons".

> it is mentioned multiple times that restocking missiles is expensive

It may be "mentioned", but it never actually has any effect on the narrative.
There's even one point where a massive attack on Manticoran manufacturing
successfully take place... and then is quietly brushed off, with zero actual
effect on anything that would get in the way of "an enemy fleet shows up and
then Honor explodes it with a bajillion missiles".

~~~
aaronem
You're doing Weber something of an injustice here, I think.

On the first hand, as the series goes on, battles tend to occur between
combatants who are no longer at or near parity with one another, as Manticore
and Haven are at the start of the series. Across several books, Weber details
how first the SD(P) project, and then Project Apollo, result in a massive
qualitative improvement of Manticoran weapons, such that their navy becomes
the most powerful in known space despite its relatively small size.

On the second hand, if the attack you mean is "Oyster Bay", then Weber's at
some pains to make clear that, while the current stock of missiles is
sufficient to defeat _one_ major attack on the scale of Filareta's, the
wholesale devastation of Manticore's military manufacturing capabilities will
result in a severe force imbalance against any further such attacks, and the
sheer size of the Solarian League's navy will come to count for much more than
their units' individual weakness against Manticoran ships -- a weakness
largely predicated on qualitative differences in missile capabilities, which
ceases to be an advantage when Manticoran ships' magazines can't be reloaded.

Granted, the end of _Mission of Honor_ and the events of _A Rising Thunder_
make clear that the manufacturing deficit isn't going to end up being the
fatal blow to Manticore that it initially appears to be. But you really can't
claim with accuracy that Weber just breezes past it as such, not when he
spends such effort (and page count) making clear to the reader that, all else
equal, Oyster Bay would necessitate Manticore's surrender in relatively short
order.

And on the third hand, Weber's been getting a lot of trouble from his fanbase
and others, since the start of the series, for his infamous habit of
"infodumps". He's done a better job of taking to heart that criticism since he
accepted that the series is no longer one which can be picked up and started
from any book. For I think the same reason, he's also started allowing the
reader to infer the actual events of a given battle, choosing to spend words
on its prelude and ramifications rather than spewing monotonous chapters on
battles whose details are a foregone conclusion.

Not to say, of course, that Weber as an author is beyond reproach -- nothing
of the sort. And his work is certainly a niche taste. But if you're going to
criticize him, you'll do a better job of it if you concentrate on problems he
actually has.

------
cjslep
I was a bit surprised at the uncanny parallel between the author's description
of the ships and the mechanics of ships in Eve. I am not sure about the
familiarity of Eve with the author, but a cool parallel nontheless.

I have also been trying to break my mind of the "space ships are boats"
mindset[0] and into the air-force notion, but they are called space _ships_ ,
and sci-fi art looks prettier when not everything is a sphere or cylinder.

[0][http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions....](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions.php)

~~~
davidlumley
> I was a bit surprised at the uncanny parallel between the author's
> description of the ships and the mechanics of ships in Eve.

That was my thought too. I always thought EVE had a fairly good use of
nomenclature for its ship types (
[https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Item_Database:Ships](https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Item_Database:Ships)
)

------
nl
Small nitpick: there really is no distinction between a "Dreadnought" and the
battleship class. The original Dreadnought really defined the class, and for a
while battleships were known as Dreadnoughts.

It's true that the battleship nomenclature was used before the Dreadnought,
but only by 25 years, and as soon as the Dreadnought came out those older
ships were referred to as "pre-Dreadnought battleships".

There's a whole interesting aside here about how the Dreadnought led to the
first real industrial arms race, and how the costs of that led to the idea of
arms control in the form of the Washington Treaty.

Also, battlecruisers really were distinct from battleships in that they lacked
armour. Germany managed to build their pre-WW2 "pocket battleships" as
battlecruisers under the terms of the Washington Treaty, but they really were
battleships. The Hood (famously sunk by the Bismarck) was the archetype of the
battlecruiser.

~~~
alricb
Battlecruisers were essentially a compromise design, trading either armour (in
the British case) or guns and armour to a lesser degree (in the German case)
for speed, at a time when a fast, fully armoured battleship carrying the
largest guns was not feasible. The idea, at least on the British side, was
that speed would compensate for armour, making the ship harder to hit and able
to make a quick escape from a squadron of slower battleships.

By WWII you could make something like the US Iowa class, fast, well-armoured
and armed, but by then battleships/cruisers had become vulnerable to carrier-
borne aircraft (as illustrated by the sinking of the _Prince of Wales_ in the
South China Sea in December 41).

~~~
nl
Battlecruisers were supposed to be a solution to the problem of "what do we do
about torpedoes?"

Torpedoes were invented in the early 20th century, and quickly made
"Monitor"-type ships obsolete.

------
moron4hire
Another way to look at deployment of ships is as a statement from a nation
that they are taking an interest--for better or worse--in the current events
of the destination, and the size of the ship is an indication of the degree of
interest. So when a country sends a frigate somewhere, it practically means
nothing, a destroyer really only means "just checking in", a cruiser is "okay,
don't make me come over there", and sending a carrier is pounding on the door,
"keep it down in there!"

Of course, that takes some chutzpah, you wouldn't see Cameroon doing that to
the US or something.

There was also no mention of submarines, but I suppose they are sort of a
stealth cruiser in there role.

~~~
aaronem
> Of course, that takes some chutzpah, you wouldn't see Cameroon doing that to
> the US or something.

Well, not so much chutzpah as the ability to project force, which the US has
and Cameroon hasn't.

Now I consider it, I'm having a hard time coming up with a space-SF universe
which has a submarine analog.

Submarines can be considered stealth cruisers, sure, but only in the commerce-
raiding role -- admittedly this was a major preoccupation of cruisers in the
Age of Sail, but less so afterward, with submarines taking over most of the
role by the time of World War I.

Cruisers do a lot of other jobs that a submarine can't, though, as for example
the projection of force. And, _vice versa_ , fleet ballistic missile
submarines exist precisely because they can provide an inherently stealthy
platform for nuclear missiles, a capability no surface ship can match.

In short, the submarine is a highly specialized type of ship whose existence
and role arises from a very specific combination of capabilities and
requirements, and which I think probably has no generic sf analog simply
because the nature of (fictive) space combat differs from that of wet-naval
combat fundamentally enough that no close analog has the opportunity to arise.

~~~
Someone
_" I'm having a hard time coming up with a space-SF universe which has a
submarine analoG"_

Klingons in Star Trek have cloaking devices that allow ships to operate slowly
and invisibly, but require them to reveal their position to fire weapons.

That's fairly close to a submarine, I would say (the match would be better if
they could do, say, warp 1, instead of no warp at all)

~~~
aaronem
More of a submersible than a submarine, since they don't cruise under cloak,
and really only in the TOS era -- "Balance of Terror" has _Enterprise_ and the
cloaked Romulan ship in almost exactly the relative positions you'd expect a
WWII heavy cruiser and submersible to occupy. (The Klingons and Romulans share
cloaking technology; IIRC, the former are said to have bought it from the
Romulans in exchange for modern ships, which is also why both Romulans and
Klingons are shown to use the "Bird of Prey" spaceframe.)

By the TNG/DS9 era, they've improved on the technology so that ships are shown
to cruise at warp under cloak, and cloak-capable ships are shown to hold their
own, without needing to cloak, against their cloakless opposite numbers. As
such, they're not really any longer in the submarine/submersible role (since a
surfaced submarine is easy meat for anything with naval guns); if anything,
they're more like a (nonexistent) submersible cruiser, in that they can
conceal themselves without needing to compromise other capabilities to achieve
it.

------
nyrath
There are some notes on warship classification here:

[http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarship.ph...](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarship.php#id
--Ship_Types)

------
linktohack
[http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions....](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions.php#wrongUp)

