Crazy J said:
My theory is a simple one. We know that both sides had a carrier vs. battleship argument going before the war, and that the prevalent weapon was the battleship, and from what it sounds like, they had those plasma/particle weapons. Now, think about this.
It wasn't so much the battlewagon as it was ships of the line with heavy weapons and shields that could slug it out with others. AS mentions battlewagons as having heavy plasma weapons (during Turner's counterattack there's a great scene when the Yorkshire and North Carolina are duking it out with kat capships).
This is a massive war. Ships are lost every day and need to be replaced quickly. Fighters are cheap and easy to build. Building a flying, armored, and lightly armed flight deck isn't that horribly difficult, either, if you build to Confed's style (every carrier is the same - one long deck with storage compartments on the side). In comparison to a battleship, it wouldn't be that expensive, either.
It takes 5 years to build a fleet carrier from the ground up. Confed actually has quite a few carrier designs that are quite different from each other. Sure, they all have long flight decks, they need them to launch and recover fighters. We aren't given an amount of time for battlewagon construciton but I would guess it would be slightly longer than a carrier.
Now, those battleships are big, and because they're all about carrying guns, they're a somewhat more complicated and expensive design than, say, the Concordia-class. When you think that a pair of torpedoes delivered by a vastly more inexpensive bomber will down most ships out there, it becomes nothing more than a glass cannon - yeah, it'll beat down the carrier, by bombers and fighters can strike before it gets within a light-minute of the carrier.
Thing your forgetting is that the fighters have to close within range of the battlewagon and survive long enough to launch their payloads. Ships are armed with multiple ways of downing torps from mass driver guns and anti-torp missiles. It requires a lot of fighters to down a heavy capship (not withstanding our own amazing flying skills in the games). I'm sure battlewagons can take a few hits before being crippled, but they are bristling with turrets that could tear a squadron to shreds when it closed to firing distance.
But, however, there are ways of defeating torpedoes. So, we still need a gun that can be used against enemy cruisers. Those big plasma turrets suck energy away from the shields and other systems, and are more than ridiculously expensive in comparison to some of the other options out there. As the natural evolution of weapons goes its course, we develop the AMG - it can do good damage, and penetrate shields. This explains why Confederation and Jutland-class carriers carried them - in the Confederation's case, to rip enemy ships to little pieces. In the Jutland's case, more or less as defensive measure than an offensive one. Ya know, just in case she gets caught with her pants down.
I'm not sure we are giving a date for the AMG's entry into service, but I would wager it was developed pre-war. The Confederation class is an interesting breed. It's one of the few carriers we see go toe to toe with other heavy capships and come out on top.
The Jutland class, well we have very limited info on it. I see the reason more because Jutlands are strike carriers. They are more likely to be committed without a lot of escorts as they can to a degree defend themselves from smaller capships' attacks.
As the natural evolution of shields goes its course, both sides develop shields that are much more resitant to AMG's. So, as the AMG itself was refined, it could now fire faster and track faster targets. So, in addition to being able to still at least bruise destroyers and cruisers, it now becomes the premier anti-fighter weapon due to its strength (lasers would still be kept handy just because some fighters can dodge AMG fire).
Where did you get this from? AMGs always ignore shields and go straight for the hull. In wc3 AMG shots are still slower than others and still do a lot of damage when you run into one. Most ships in wc3 only mount a few AMGs, anti-fighter weapons are more likely to be faster moving and refiring lasers and tachyon turrets, just think how deadly that one tachyon turret on corvettes are. WCP/SO sees more lasers/ion/tachyon turrets because of the reasons stated above.
After the war, with recovering economies and fully restored fleets, it now becomes viable to build massive cruisers to help supplement their carrier fleets. Previous cruisers were kept smaller to make them quicker to build, but now we can once again build ones as large as or bigger than most fleet carriers to go convoy hunting, or to act as flagship for a fleet that only has light or escort carriers for fighters. The Plasma and/or Particle turrets now make a come-back, as rather than trying to penetrate shields like the original AMG's, they just plow through them with brute force and inflict damage that would make torpedo insane with envy.
Do you consider the Waterloo class to be small? And you realize the war is over right? Confed slashed the military spending after the treaty and very few new ships were being constructed. You have to remember that the Lunar shipyards were totally destroyed during BoT. Granted some of the other yards escaped damage, but I don't think they started cranking out cruisers postwar. If anything they probably built ships that would better aid recovery and rebuilding.
I don't think Plasma turrets went anywhere, we simply didn't see them on ships we were around. The front lines were HUGE, so we couldn't possibly see every type of ship serving on the lines. Just because we don't see it, doesn't mean it doesnt' exist.
There, a simple theory one why Plamsa's disappeared during the Kilrathi war and came back later. And only brought up because I read the prior argument and I couldn't fall asleep last night due to large amounts of caffiene. It seems logical; I mean, a ship that's 1,200 meters long surely couldn't be built in one month's time, so you'd need something cheaper and quicker to fill out the ranks.
5 years for a carrier and 10 years to build a shipyard and train the personnel to run it. Again, just because we don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.