Re: [GZG] Battlecruisers

Richard Bell wrote:

>I recently read the "Tough Guide to the Universe" and got a small bee
>up my nose about how the author used the term "battlecruiser".
>Although, what he really got right was that any ship labelled
>"battlecruiser" gets its coolness factor upped several notches, so
>long as it is fast and has big guns.
>
>It got me thinking about how battlecruisers are handled in games.
>They are usually ships between a heavy cruiser and a battleship.  Only
>one navy (the USN) ever built ships like that, and they were called
>"Large Cruisers" (the Alaska class).

At least one other navy built ships like that. Compare the stats for the

Alaskas with those of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau - you might get 
surprised by the similarities...

FWIW, at the time the S&G were built the Royal Navy classified them as 
"battlecruisers" since that was the RN's catch-all term for any fast 
capital ship regardless of armour or armament :-/

>All ships that were actually called battlecruisers were as large as, if

>not larger, than
>battleships. The HMS Hood, a battlecruiser, was the largest warship
>in the world, until the Bismark was completed.  Battlecruisers were
>basically dreadnoughts that exchanged weight of armor for weight of
>machinery to get an extra turn of speed.  The only game that ever got
>this right was Starfire, as a BC was faster than a BB and if it
>accepted less protection, it could mount the same armament.

StarFire doesn't get this right either, since it restricts BCs to a mere

80% the size of BBs (and a mere 62% the size of "SDNs"). This is of
course 
quite contrary to the Hood example. Sure, you can build a StarFire BC
with 
the same armament as a typical BB, but if you do you'll get a ship with
the 
defences of an average destroyer...

>For an FT ship to be the equivalent of a true BC, it would need to
>combine a thrust of eight with enough class-4 beams to threaten a CA
>at the 24+ rangeband (preferably 36-48),

Sounds like you're talking about a Vector-optimized background here. For

the (Cinematic) GZGverse, both the thrust-8 and the class-4s are IMO
rather 
over the top - it'd make your BC faster than any other GZGverse ship
except 
the ESU Lenov-class scout, and allow it to outrange any other ship
except 
the ESU Komarov-class SDN...

With most GZGverse capital ships restricted to thrust ratings of 2-4,
and 
fast cruisers and destroyers generally having thrust 6, a
"Fischer-style" 
GZGverse BC would only need to *match* the fastest smaller cruisers -
ie., 
thrust 6.

Similarly with armament: when most GZGverse capital ships relying on 
class-*3* batteries for their main armament (except for the Komarov,
that 
is), and cruisers having at most 2 class-3s, giving your "Fischer-style"
BC 
a main armament of 3-4 class-3 batteries would allow it to comfortably 
outgun any heavy cruiser it encounters while rivalling most slower 
battleships and dreadnoughts in firepower (though not in survivability,
of 
course).

Regards,

Oerjan
oerjan.ariander@rixmail.se

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
-Hen3ry

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