On the Taxonomy of Sci-Fi Spaceships

An anonymous reader writes: Jeff Venancio has done some research that's perfect reading for a lazy Saturday afternoon: figuring out a coherent taxonomy for sci-fi spaceships. If you're a sci-fi fan, you've doubtless heard or read references to a particular starship's "class" fairly often. There are flagships and capital ships, cruisers and corvettes, battleships and destroyers. But what does that all mean? Well, there's not always consistency, but a lot of it comes from Earth's naval history. "The word 'corvette' comes from the Dutch word corf, which means 'small ship,' and indeed corvettes are historically the smallest class of rated warship (a rating system used by the British Royal Navy in the sailing age, basically referring to the amount of men/guns on the vessel and its relative size; corvettes were of the sixth and smallest rate). ... They were usually used for escorting convoys and patrolling waters, especially in places where larger ships would be unnecessary."

Venancio takes the historical context for each ship type and then explains how it's been adapted for a sci-context. "Corvettes might be outfitted to have some sort of stealth or cloaking system for reconnaissance or spec ops missions; naturally it would be easier to cloak a smaller ship than a larger one (though plenty of examples of large stealth ships exist). In some series they are likely to be diplomatic vessels due to their small size and speed, particularly seen in Star Wars, and can commonly act as blockade runners (again; their small size and speed makes them ideal for slipping through a blockade, where a larger ship presents more of a target)."

Comments

What's in a word?

[belthize]

This is a whole new level of naval gazing.

somebody is trying too hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no consistent approach and due to various changes, even the historical usage varies considerably.

Besides, sometimes the authors make their ships less dense than smoke.

Re:somebody is trying too hard.

[The Grim Reefer]

There is no consistent approach and due to various changes, even the historical usage varies considerably

No kidding. My Corvette is usually only manned by me, and occasionally one other person. It has no armament, and scares the hell out of me when it gets off the ground, let alone leaves the atmosphere. And it might as well be parked, even at top speed, when compared to the slowest space faring vehicles.

Re:somebody is trying too hard.

[war4peace]

I am working on a space-based MMO strategy game. In my game, the taxonomy... well, it's player-specific. Each player can name his ship classes any way he wants.
There are 5+1 types of ships by size: tiny, small, medium, large and capital. A separate type is Organic ships, which also have 5 size types.
Then you have specializations, e.g. scout ship, command ship, gunship, shield ship, repair ship, transport ship, etc.
Then you have ship generations, each generation becoming available based on research of a standard ship blueprint. An initial blueprint, once researched, allows you to assign extra points to certain ship attributes (e.g. speed, hitpoints, available power, available processing power, fuel bay size, etc) from a point pool you're getting from that research. This allows players to create unique ships all day long (some would suck more than others, that's for sure but hey, it's freedom to do stupid things).
Then you put modules on the ships, and those modules use up mounting points from the attributes. Some modules would only fit certain specializations and ship sizes (you can't fit a capital command room on a tiny scout ship because you don't have enough space, processing power or room).

No classes. Classes are so... yesterday's jam.

Re:somebody is trying too hard.

[sysrammer]

Sounds good, and that's more or less the way ships are really designed. Instead of a points pool, there's the budget and resources. Whether or not they're called classes, you're going to have a largest and a smallest. Once you have that, you can have something in the middle. With more fine tuning one ends up with a small-medium group, and a medium-large, for certain mission types or budgets. So I think your 5 groupings is spot on.

Regarding designers doing dumb things, history is littered with "classes" of only one or two ships. And, of course, we can't always blame the designers; often they're directed to do things that they do by other people/organizations.

Good luck with your game.

Neglected the Rule of Cool

[Noble713]

Didn't read TFA but I can assume he neglected one key point:

Most authors pick their class names because they sound cool, not because they feel it accurately describes the tactical/operational role of the ship design in question. Which they probably wouldn't get correct anyway. It's not like these authors commonly employ professional military consultants to harden up the details of their in-universe militaries. And in most cases scrutinizing how a ship should be employed would also lead to scrutinizing the weapons complement/layout/fire arcs/etc.....leading to most "sexy" space warships needing a complete redesign to make any sense. And the creative types don't want fictional space engineering (naval architecture?) intruding on their storytelling.

Re:Neglected the Rule of Cool

[NicBenjamin]

The only SciFi franchise I'm familiar with that has sensibly designed ships is the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. This is because it's a book series (so there's no graphic artist trying to make the good guy ships a beautiful white fleet with wings like birds, and the bad guy ships industrial contraptions that are some hideous shade of orange), but it's mostly because he specifically designed the physics of his universe around the military tactics he wanted.

Re:Neglected the Rule of Cool

[OzPeter]

The only SciFi franchise I'm familiar with that has sensibly designed ships is the Honor Harrington series by David Weber.

That is because Honor Harrington IS 17th to 19th century naval warfare dressed up as sci-fi. You can also see exactly the same thing going on in his Safehold series, where he is basically retelling the history of warfare as a backdrop to the story.

Re:Neglected the Rule of Cool

[sysrammer]

In one of Larry Niven's books, a small group of protectors have a space battle that takes months, as they don't have FTL. He compresses the hell out of the timeline and makes it interesting, of course, including a slingshot maneuver around a neutron star.

Re:Neglected the Rule of Cool

[sysrammer]

C.J. Cherryh has a universe of space stations and ships. While reading one of them, I enjoyed the realistic depiction of life aboard a corvette. I eventually came to realize that it was a lot like the books I've read about life aboard sailing man-o-wars. Which makes sense, as the parallels are there, and she's just describing how a lot of humans react in the same situations.

Re:Neglected the Rule of Cool

[ageoffri]

And even David Weber had to redo the mass of the ships after it was pointed out that his early numbers made them less dense than water.

Re:Neglected the Rule of Cool

[dwywit]

I've always been impressed with Niven and Niven/Pournelle descriptions of ships and space combat. The generation ship of the fithp in Footfall, and the "Michael" nuke-pulse ship used to defeat them.

Plagiarism?

[Solandri]

Skimmed TFA. If I remember correctly the spacecraft construction volume for Traveller (an RPG probably most famous for the use of AI to figure out optimal solutions to the game rules, to defeat all human opponents in an annual competition), his spaceship classes are identical. Corvette, frigate/escort, destroyer, cruiser, battleship, carrier, dreadnaught.

I suppose it might not necessarily be plagiarism. Those classes are pretty similar to how most naval fleets are strategically divided.

Re:Or, for you visual folks...

[ArcadeMan]

Do you work for the Huffington Post? Why not link directly to the DeviantART page of DirkLoechel?

Missing banks

[spongman]

I'm sorry but any article on ship naming that doesn't include GSVs, GCUs, ROUs and Very Fast Pickets is severely lacking in gravitas.

Re:Missing banks

[angel'o'sphere]

Especially if they are followed by 'dM', like ROU dM Zealot or sometimes(usually?) written (d) ROU Zealot ...

Not to forget that VFP is usually an euphemism for (d) ROU, which is often enough only demilitarized in function, not in weaponry nor in spirit.

Re:Shitty cover art

[sysrammer]

And how about a battleship in space? Or a train in space? It reminds me of our patent office, where any everyday thing "but on the internet" gets you a shiny new long number.

Space will have a drone carrier carrier

[gurps_npc]

Assuming light speed communication, the huge distances involved drone-carrier-carrier will probably become the killer ship. Lets call it the Super Carrier.

This combat technique sends drones out to attack. But they will be too far away from the main ship directly communicate soon enough. So you have a slower, hidden super carrier that transports drone carriers most of the way. Say, from Earth to within 20 light seconds of the target (Mars for example). When combat arrives, it launches smaller drone carriers while the super carrier goes dark for the duration of the battle. It never sends any electrical or heat signal, after launching the drone carriers.

The drone carriers will do the final approach, within a couple of light seconds of the target (Earth's moon is 1.5 light seconds away from the earth). Then they launch a bunch of attack drones, which are directly controlled by the drone carriers. Assuming an equal opponent, the drones will attack their opponent's drone carriers. Once all your opponent's drone carriers are taken out, you re-task your remaining drones as scouts looking for your opponent's super-carrier. Unless of course they surrender.

This allows the majority of your military support crew to be a safe distance from the battle until you have won/lost. It minimizes your own losses, while maximizing your opponents.

TFA is Wrong on Frigates & Destroyers

[vikingpower]

Today, in today's navies and naval thinking, "frigate" and "destroyer" are different answers upon the question: "We can build a warship of a certain size, as we have the resources to do that. Now how are we going to use that hull ?" If the answer is "frigate"; then you dedicate a large portion of that hull to propulsion systems and fuel. What space remains is for weapons systems, electronics, and crew quarters. What you get: a relatively fast, maybe very fast, ship - with a limited choice of weapons systems. This is the choice the Dutch Royal Navy has been making for decades: they want to possess the ability to arrive on the spot soon, and to act far away from home ( e.g. in order to fulfill the Dutch NATO-assigned duty of participating in keeping the North Atlantic trade routes free and open ).

If the answer is "we want to deploy as much firepower as possible from that hull", then a destroyer is what you get. You have less space for propulsion systems and fuel, hence you can be on the spot less soon and operate not so far away from home - but each and every ship present makes a relatively large impact upon the scene. This is the current choice of the German Navy, which has to patrol the East and North Seas, relatively close to naval bases.

Re:Missing new classification...

[St.Creed]

They probably contracted the building of the station to the lowest bidder - and it wasn't in the initial specs.