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.

The solution to trying to figure out the ship types was to eventually develop a somewhat standardized tonnage spectrum:

1. Utility Craft (U) (1 to 99 tons)
2. Escort (100 to 2,499 tons)
3. Light Battleship (BL) (2,500 to 99,999 tons)
4. Medium Battleship (BM) (100,000 to 199,999 tons)
5. Pocket Battleship (BP) (200,000 to 249,999 tons)
6. Heavy Battleship (BH) (250,000 to 499,999 tons)
7. Superheavy Battleship (BS) (500,000 to 999,999 tons)
8. Ultraheavy Battleship (BU) (1,000,000 or more tons)

And that's pretty much what the wiki sticks to. The mostly standardized tonnage bounds make it easy to categorize what might otherwise be near impossible.
Escort (100 to 2,499 tons) or ACS → Light Ships → Medium Ships (100,000 to 249,999 tons) → Pocket Ships (200,000 to 249,999 tons) (...a subset of mediums to cover an in-between spot covering a hybrid medium-heavy) → Heavy Ships (250,000 to 499,999 tons) → Superheavy Ships (500,000 to 999,999 tons) → Ultraheavy Ships or WCS (1,000,000 or more tons)

In real life the boundaries between destroyers and cruisers is pretty conflicted by this point. Some destoryers and bigger than cruisers used to be and vice-versa...

Some of those ideas were captured in this section:

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Heavyweight Cruiser vs Speedy Cruiser?: CONFUSING TERMINOLOGY: The term Cruiser can often be misleading. Defined namesake cruisers are large, heavyweight vessels that can support the line-of-battle, and are meant to slug it out in main fleet engagements. They are large, well armed ships, that can even overwhelm dreadnoughts and super-heavy vessels in sufficient numbers. Vessels such as the Arakoine class Strike Cruiser or Aek Naz class Battlecruiser represent these large vessels which can have displacements in the range of multiple tens of thousands of tons. Obsolescent members of the Cruiser classification (... such as the Lightning class Fleet Intruder, now reclassified as the Lightning class Frontier Cruiser) are often sold off to the IISS, to Colonial or Provincial Subsector Navies, or are put into strategic reserve for reactivation and reassignment to Subsector Navies in time of war.

There are also vessels called "Cruisers" which lack the size and hitting power of the aforementioned Imperial Navy cruisers, but typically possess speed and endurance. They cruise or move speedily compared to larger capital ships. These are often small, speedy vessels that hit over weight for their size class, but would stand next to no chance against a naval-fleet sized slugger of a combatant. Vessels such as these are generally referred to as "Colonial Cruisers" and are typically found in Subsector and/or Planetary Naval forces as heavy patrol vessels. Vessels massing in the 800-3000 ton range (... such as the Sydkai class Colonial Cruiser or Broadsword class Mercenary Cruiser) are representative of this smaller latter type. By Imperial Navy standards, they are cruisers in name only.

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