Sylvester said:
Allrighty, I'll trim the laser cannons and remove the torpedo tubes. Will that be more sufficent. I'm currently modelling the ship in CAD and will post pics tommorow. And it takes a few years to design the Vesuvius, so designs on it must of started before the war ended.
The Vesuvius was started towards the war's end, yes, though I suspect its roots were in some of the Black projects that were occuring in the last ten or so years of the war - remember the Behemoth, for example. The main thing about the Vesuvius is that it was the 'next step' in capship design - basically a conventional carrier, but scaled up in size and striking power, due to its fighter wings, PLUS a lot of armor. In concept, I'd have to say it was more akin to the supercruiser design or a modified Confederation-class dreadnought, in terms of its armor and armament.
It was somewhat faster than most carriers, tougher, and incorporated some of the Kilrathi innovations - including the ability to jump ships above a certain size and mass, though that too had some limitations, namely in the jump points that technology could exploit. Whether this was taken directly from the technology developed from the Hakaga, or developed indepently by Confed is not stated.. but it should be noted that the first ships were being completed some years after the War was finished, which indicates construction began either during the last year of the Kilrathi War, or just after. We don't know if they had to retool or revise the design to add any of the Kilrathi innovations, but we do know that this was different from the Kilrathi War-era designs because those were basically revised Rangers or Concordias, given the requirements of wartime.
However, even though it was a relatively new concept, the Vesuvius' design was still more akin to traditional Confed carriers and cruisers than the Nimitz previously shown was... and honestly, I'm a little leery of recycling current 'real world' ship class names, especially given the pattern in WC was to use completely NEW class-names, even if the naming traditions remained the same.
The Nimitz was far too heavily armed for most carriers... yet didn't have enough punch to be a proper ship-killer by itself, because of the limited number of torpedoes. It's too large to be anything but a supercarrier, yet was far lighter than it had any right to be, even as a carrier, given its size and the weapons it mounted, which would've made its mass probably comparable to a similarly equipped Vesuvius. It tries to do too many things at once (be a cruiser AND a carrier), and in doing so becomes a rather poor capship killer.