If that were the case, then shouldn't it refer to the model/type? i.e. "Type VII phase shields are the latest improvement to capship defenses, blah, blah, blah."
While I agree that would be ideal, it's certainly the case that the other weapons descriptions in the JFS 2664 Update are listed by general type when they refer to a specific model. The description for the "Torpedo" is actually for the "Lance Mark III Anti-Matter Torpedo" -- which is distinct from a proton torpedo or a fusion torpedo or a light torpedo or even the other models of Lances.
Source? My impression was always that the Midway was a far larger capital ship than the Vesuvius.
It's a situation similar to the Tiger's Claw (specific example) and the Confederation-class: The Midway-class is 1,830 meters long and masses 200,000 tonnes... the Vesuvius-class is 1,600 meters long and masses 250,000 tonnes. The tonnage for the Vesuvius comes from the Wing Commander IV adaptation, the length is that which is simulated in Secret Ops. The numbers for the Midway are from Prophecy's official guide. The Vesuvius shows up in her post-role war in the introduction to Secret Ops, with the TCS McKinley as the centerpiece of the fleet assigned to the Sol Sector.
As I said, though, the RN and Amphibious Assault Ships are a fairly close approximation. Although the more I dig, the less Prophecy seems internally consistant with itself.
At ths risk of bringing the debate to a new area, I'd certainly be interested to know how.
Also, I feel the need to admonish myself for my previous posting: I somehow managed to say "Cerberus class" instead of "Hades class".
The book also describes the Lexington and Princeton as having dual flight decks, and having almost exactly the same internal design as the Concordia. How do we resolve that?
I always preferred the alternate train of thought: The engine wasn't capable of doing a true Concordia in 3D. As a result, we were supposed to pretend that the ship was like the Concordia. Sure, it has holes, but no more holes than the 30+ year old carrier design theory.
That's a good question, and one that I don't think we've properly addressed since the whole "Concordia secretly being a Confederation-class ship" argument died out some years back.
My suggestion for an in-fiction explanation involves two things:
a) the "internal" layout of the ship is very similar to the Confederation-class -- as a rush job to counter the supposed Sivar-class threat, the designers of the Confederation-class borrowed existing deck plans from the navy's standard Concordia-class wherever possible.
b) the "two flight decks" refers to the idea that the carrier has two catapults (side to side) and then two completely independant fighter storage/repair/ready-ing bays (one on each side).
Just to annoy the starch out of you, I'm going to point out that there are only TWO Concordias in the game and book continuity. A third one only appears if we attempt to harmonize the movie with the game. Not to mention the fact that Action Stations kind of screwed with the continuity anyway...
Well, right back at you, then -- because I can prove that there's a third TCS Concordia without using the movie (not that I have any personal reason to separate it). In fact, among the community, the 'third Concordia' claim pre-dates the release of the movie for specifically this reason: the Kilrathi Saga manual references the existence of a TCS Concordia in 2656.
Fleet Action gives a solid 2661 service entry date for Wing Commander 2's TCS Concordia (CVS-65)... and her own backstory (a rush job based on technology recovered the wreck of the Sivar) also precludes a 2656 Confederation class.
Actually, I considered pointing out that the Ark Royal and the Concordia line up pretty well with the Yorktown and Enterprise, but I decided to bite my tongue. No, the mapping between carrier classes is not 1 -> 1, but we can use general parallels from WWII to apply to the WC universe. Using those parallels makes it fairly easy to to demonstrate the most likely outcomes of certain situations. And one of those outcomes is that a pre-war carrier is doubtful to be manufactured throughout a 30 year war. (WWII only lasted about 6 years, and look how many new classes of carrier were produced!)
Actually, I think there's a much better analogy here. The "pre war" designs which appear in AS (the Coral Sea, Soryu, etc.) are the equivalent of the Yorktown-class.
The Concordia-class is Wing Commander's equivalent of the Essex-class... a *design* which precedes the war (the USS Essex was laid down in April, 1941)... but continues to serve well beyond it (often with significant modifications). Essex/Ticonderoga-class carriers that were laid down during the war -- the equivalent of the Princeton! -- continue to enter service in the post-war era.
The Lady Lex was recently remodelled, so it makes sense to keep her on. But was she really a Concordia or Ranger class carrier? The only reference we have is the book, which suggests that she's actually a Confederation class dreadnought! Certainly it seems that the scripts had intended the Confederation class to continue to serve despite any issues with the main canon... err... I mean cannon.
She's certainly not a Ranger-class -- they were retired after the war (per the novel), and they're shorter (and carry less fighters) than the Concordia-class.
It's a possibility I suppose. It would certainly explain why the Princeton was at the shipyards, and why she had little to no defensive capability. (A carrier's fighter compliment doesn't just magically disappear.) The destruction of the Lexington would provide a good backstory for that, because the Lex (being recently remodelled) was probably supposed to cover certain operations even after the Vesuvius was online. (Actually, wasn't the Lex under construction during the Battle of Earth? In which case, she would be a relatively new carrier.)
In looking over the elaborate 'carrier production history' TC and I devised some years back based on novel references, we were required by the sheer amount of carriers referenced in late war sources (Privateer, WC3, FA, etc.) to list the TCS Princeton as a Concordia-class hull that was begun in 2668 and then finished after the war. That also seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation why it's still around -- but a twenty year old ship of the same class like the TCS Liberty was scrapped. (But then note that the Liberty was scrapped in 2672 rather than *immediately* after the war ended...).
We have the Lexington as a ship that would have originally entered service in 2668... the further backstory was that it was then crippledi during the Battle of Earth and almost completely rebuilt afterwards - it ended up seeing a few months of service at the very end of the war.
(
http://www.hamtwoslices.net/loaf/fleetcarriers.html is the quick-and-dirty carrier chart)
I'll have to reinstall the game and review the data when I get the chance. It just doesn't seem right that the Prophecy fighters would be *smaller*. Then again, Prophecy was done with a constant "brain drain" on its former Origin talent base.
In all fairness to the team, only Prophecy and Wing Commander II scale their fighters properly -- a Hellcat is *not* 27 meters long when Blair climbs into it on the flight deck. (Best guess is that someone in 1990 mixed up feet and meters and most further games decided not to create an inconsistency).
I believe the lengths and masses listed in the CIC's ship section are all taken right from the ship viewer, if you want to save yourself the trouble of reinstalling the game:
https://www.wcnews.com/ships2/wcpconfed.shtml
If I may ask, what are we using as a reference?
I'm using the specifications for the 2619 Bengal 'utility carrier' in the Handbook as the 'original' Bengal -- and then a pair of later references to the 'Kipling and later' Bengals size. I've got them arranged online here:
https://www.wcnews.com/ships2/wc1bengal.shtml
I do. Fleet carriers, destroyers, battleships, and the like *move*. They hide, they run, they attack, they play mind games that can keep a full intelligence agency busy. Planets don't do that. They just sit there. And recon is relatively easy to coordinate compared to the problems inherent in tracking outbound bombers, inbound enemy bombers, space superiorty battles, defensive battles, and bomber cover battles all simulataneously.
Wouldn't the normal CIC need to coordinate these things *anyway*? I'm not sure I'd want to serve on the carrier where they decided they could remain blind to other threats simply because they didn't have the proper kind of ordinance to attack them with bombers.
The closest relative of the supposed Concordia class, the Ranger class, is listed as having capship torpedos. The Concordia class is larger and more powerful, so my feeling is that we've simply never the tubes in action. Not to mention that the Visual rule was broken in WCIV during the conflict between the Lex and the Durango. While that might have something to do with the fact that Paulson was an idiot, we see similar engagements later in the game between the Durango and the Vesuvius, and the Vesuvius and her sister ship. Prophecy expands on this by showing the Midway present for a variety of capship engagements.
I think the core problem with the "keep your distance" rule in the WCverse, is that ships must use jump points. As a result, there are many instances where a carrier may be required to punch her way through an enemy line either on an outbound leg, or on an inbound surprise attack. I know I'd certainly feel better if my carrier could get a few cap missiles off while I'm still getting my fighters off the deck.
I think the 'keep your distance' rule applies to straight up fleet carriers in Wing Commander -- they have battlegroups that will clear jump points for them. (And Paulson is certainly ridiculed quite a bit in the Wing Commander IV adaptation for being so inexperienced as to move the Lexington directly into combat with Border Worlds capital ships.)
The Vesuvius and the Midway both have anti-capital-ship weaponry -- antimatter guns and heavy ion cannons, respectively. Both are classified as being "heavy fleet carriers", presumably including this as one of the reasons.
I believe you're referring to Capital Ship Missiles, though -- which *aren't* a form of torpedo. They're just large, long range, high yield explosives... that are present, per Victory Streak, specifically on *older* capital ships. They don't pass through phase sheilds or anything of the sort -- they're heavy enough to blast down shields like a plasma weapon. (They're what the Victory fires a time or two in Wing Commander III).
But he lists both Battleships and Battlewagons. That makes little sense overall, and battlewagon is a really stupid name for any sort of naval craft. ("Wagon" tends to imply wheels.) If he wanted to invent a new type of ship, he should have taken the time to understand how the various types got their names in the first place. i.e.:
(ship list cut for space)
Dreadnought -> Derived from the name HMS Dreadnought, so named because the ship's company would "dread nought but God." The HMS Dreadnought brought about the modern form of battleship, and thus battleships were referred to as "pre-dreadnought" and "post-dreadnought". Later, the later term was shortened to simply "dreadnought".
Using those as a base, I suppose he could argue that there was an HMS BattleWagon, and that was what resulted in the battlewagon name. But that makes little sense considering that he still uses the term "battleship" alongside "battlewagon". Thus it would have been far more accurate had he found a *use* for the ship, then given it a new type name. (I'd think of an example, but I really have no idea how a battlewagon differs from a battleship and/or cruiser or frigate.) Of course, given his WWII analogy, using the term Dreadnought instead of Battlewagon would have been more appropriate.
While I agree with the fact that battlewagon is a silly sounding name, it's *not* something Forstchen invented -- it's a normal term used to refer to the big World War II battleships that Forstchen is trying to put in the novel. As I mentioned earlier, the internet dictionary supports this theory... though I'm loathe to site it as a serious source. Here's a better experiment: run 'battlewagon' through Amazon. You'll come up with the term used in a dozen book titles that are about World War II battleships. I don't know the etymology (I would be interested, though!), but it's a real term that refers to the very thing AS wants.