Cruiser/meta

So Many Cruisers! (2019)

What is a cruiser? Good question.

The general consensus is that a cruiser is mid to high-level combatant somewhere in this spectrum:
Escort → Destroyer → Cruiser → Battleship / Dreadnought

But after those base assumptions, it really begins to break down.

The Keith Brothers designed the vast majority of their ships in the 100 to 100,000 ton range. And I mean everything from the smallest scout vessel to the largest battleships. There are exceptions of course, but most of their material kept within those tonnage bounds. They were obviously versed in the age of sail analogies use din the original LBBs and often used language from that era, missile magazines, arms lockers, picket boats, and the like. That stylistic choice always leaves a bit of Victorian Science Fiction (VSF) or steampunk to Traveller. Marc's first novel, Agent of the Imperium is full of such vocabulary. It drives some fans nutty.

By the time of Classic Traveller Supplement 9 in 1981, the OTU was really beginning to come together, and the Tigress class Dreadnought came out with a weigh-in of half a million tons (500,000 tons).

And that's pretty much where the tonnage cap has stayed since then. Half a millions tons is considered pretty honking large and a serios commitment of resources and labor. Works like Power Projection: Fleet skirt a little over that limitation (...the Idlev class Superbattleship at 560,000 tons) and Marc likes to push the 11 out of 10 trope a bit such as in his novel Agent of the Imperium (...the mechanical life megaship), but the half a mill mark is it.

Of course fans pretty much pay no attention to the limitations of canon (...even Traveller's canon definition, which is already pretty permissive), so the ship library has a number of vessels that weigh in at a million or more tons... While the wiki caps such ship plan contributions at or around that mark, there are quite a few designs out there on fan sites that weigh in at several million tons, or even over a billion tons! In the OTU of Charted Space with TL:13-15 technology, conventional ships over a half a million tons would take a number of years to build and consume massive resources and effort (...think of the pyramids). Of course, there is always a deus ex machina of some sort out there and nanotechnology is so imaginatively thought of that it can do almost anything... like magic. Cue Clarke's laws!

Now, when it comes to cruisers, they are the most numerous or one of the most numerous types of ships in the wiki ship library. However, there is no standard that has ever really been set with them, mission-wise, size-wise, or otherwise. Some of the earliest cruiser weigh in under 10k, while some of the largest weigh in at several hundred kilotons.

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 09:12, 10 September 2019 (EDT)