Of Ships and Names

 What did a battleship do? Or a cruiser or a destroyer? Learning interesting things to not sound like a nong when using those words. For those interested here is the cliff notes version.

A cruiser is your basic 'workhorse' warship. It does the commerce raiding, escorting and is the backbone of your fleet. They need to be a mix of speed, endurance and firepower.

A Battleship by contrast is all about the big guns and bringing them to dominate a naval battle. Big guns, armour to withstand said guns and a measure of speed to get anywhere useful made Battleships very expensive. This made committing them a chancy thing at best as they were a lot of eggs in one basket.

By contrast, a Destroyer is a specialist warship.

Originally short for torpedo-destroyer, it was a platform for bringing the then-new weapons to the battlefield. Later, they filled other specialist roles such as anti-submarine or anti-aircraft roles.

So what does this mean in your typical Space-Opera? Ideally, we want words to mean similar things to what they do now so the cognitive load on the reader is lessened. So if your space warship travels from world to world engaging enemies, running down pirates, enforcing blockades, fighting in fleets and showing the flag then it is likely a cruiser. The Enterprise from

StarTrek is a cruiser as are the Star Destroyers from Star Wars.

By contrast, if it's all about big guns and only fighting ships then you're looking at a battleship. The Executor or Command ship from Star Wars is a good example. Particularly since it was ultimately mission killed by smaller specialist warships.

Destroyers are rarer birds in visual SF since that expensive model, CG work often will appear in multiple roles. Examples would be those ships built around a new weapon system. The best example is the Romulan ship from 'Balance of Terror'. That ship was all about its plasma ball weapon and cloaking device.

So there you are. Words. They mean things.