Weird Harold wrote:Part of your confusion comes from Manticore (and RHN, IAN, and others) assigning designations based on designed purpose, while the SLN assigns designations by displacement.
What further complicates designations is the variance in combat capability of a given class in different navies; A Roland is a destroyer the size of a light cruiser that has as much combat capability as pre-war heavy cruisers or battle cruisers.
In large part, ship class is determined by armor and weapons installation. Designed mission is another huge factor. Speed and maneuverability is another factor. Intended opponents probably figures into things too.
In short, a Ship is whatever class the owners say it is -- within reason. I doubt anyone is going to take the claim that, "a
Nat Turner is an SD," seriously.
Plus technology changes things up which makes it hard to compare ships of even a couple decades apart during times of great change.
In the Honorverse, got back 60-70 years, and while frigates and destroyers had overlapping tonnage brackets they had wildly difference focuses. A destroyer was much like the earliest torpedo boat destroyers -- they pack a powerful weapons fit for their size, with a good turn of speed, but are too short legged for independent deployment. A frigate is about the same size but carries far fewer weapons in order to have the endurance for long range deployments. A frigate would get crushed in head to head combat with a similar sized destroyer. But, on the other hand, you couldn't send the destroyer out to patrol Silesia without sending a tender along with it to keep it resupplied and repaired.
But the minimum hull size necessary to fit the minimum capable warfighting kit kept growing, so by the start of the series a modern destroyer is big enough (to hold it's weapons) that finding space for the fuel and supplied for far better cruise endurance is a trivial impact - and the deadlier weapons and need for greater defenses make a frigate increasingly less effective
and have less of a endurance advantage over the most modern destroyers. So frigates are dropped and DDs take over both roles.
A similar thing almost happened here on Earth where the USN, right after WWII, looked at the size and cost necessary to make a multi-role destroyer for the jet age. They went from the last wartime design, the 2,616 ton
Gearing-class destroyer to the 5,600 ton USS
Norfolk; before deciding they couldn't afford to build destroyes that big and expensive and dramatically scaled back their requirements to the 2,800 ton
Forrest Sherman-class DDs and 3,642 ton
Mitscher-class DLs. (And a new Arleigh Burke DD can weigh in around 9,000 tons!)
Different navies do things differently. The current RN uses Destroyer for anti-air focused units (like their brand new Type-45 destroyer) and Frigate for anti-submarine focused units. In theory if the kit needed for ASW required a larger hull than the kit for AAW then the RN would have frigates that are larger than their destroyers.
The USN doesn't quite do things that way, though their Destroyers are AAW/ASW while their cruisers don't have the anti-submarine focus.
Daryl wrote:Lots of good accurate information there. I'd add just a couple of points. Light cruisers in the Honorverse and here tended to have longer ranges and more endurance than destroyers, and could carry a few marines.
Mind you we got confused in WW2 as HMS Belfast (restored and moored in the Thames), is classified as a light cruiser because it is only 6 inch, but has 12 of them and is 11,500 tons. Bit of a shock for any destroyer that took it on.
Technology moves on and the newest trend is to pod laying SDs, which greatly increases their throw weight, and with Apollo they can control more missiles at greater ranges. Plus lighter warships with pre placed pods can take on many times their tonnage.
The US Cleavland class CLs were similar 11,744 ton, 12 6-inch + 12 5-inch. But both classes were a somewhat artificial result of the way the interwar Naval Treaties were written. They're bigger than optimal for a "balanced" 6-inch design but you "wasted" treaty tonnage if you build then lighter, so both CLs and CAs were targeted at 10,000 tons and differed primarily in the size of their guns 6" vs 8" (and 10k tons was too light to have a balanced 8" cruiser with a reasonable number of guns; so those tended to be tin-clad; not armored well enough to stand up to their own guns. (See the post-treaty USN Baltimore-class of 14,500 tons 8" cruisers for what you need for a more balanced armoring)
