It's possible that in the time between WC4 and Prophecy Confed may have built another Fleet Carrier class other than the Vesuvius. If this were the case, I'd go out on a limb, and say that it wouldn't be as big, but still large enough to carry all the newer heavy fighter/bomber classes. The new class would probably not incorporate all the developments of the Vesuvious class for the sake of rapid production, and lower cost.
That's quite possible, but this wouldn't fit with the requirement that the Eisen be a heavy fleet carrier which mounts multiple fighter wings... The indication in the ICIS manual is that Confed uses dedicated escort carriers for smaller actions.
I would guess that Vesuvious class vessels would take a very long time to build, and require quite a lot of money. As such, Confed might want to desighn something more along the lines of a Concordia class, but with substantial improvements. Also, after narrowly surviving a 40 year long war, I would hope tha ConFleet would have learned not to hang all it's hopes on one class of really big ship.
There are some limitations imposed on carrier production spoken of in the novels, which explain why Confed produces only a carrier or two each year instead of a billion of them...
- It takes ten years to produce a new carrier shipyard.
- It takes five years to tool a shipyard up to produce a new class of carrier.
Fighting the Kilrathi meant that shipyards were destroyed as quickly as they could be produced... so we didn't have a huge stream of new carriers at some point. If we could jump to fifteen years after the war ended maybe we could start to see a surge in weird new carriers (of course, this doesn't count time to *design* a new class of carriers -- that took something like ten years in the case of the Cerberus...)
So we are saying that the only carriers still in service from and being produced from the end of WC4 to WCP (what is that, 10-15 years?) are the Vesuvius-class? That would put a major hole in the operational effeciency of the fleet. The war with the Kilrathi is over, why wait 10-15 years to start replacing your fleet carriers? That seems very ineffecient in the way the new Confed ran things after the Kilrathi War (effeciency reports, rank pass-over, etc). And before we start the wholw "it takes that long to design, test and, build a carrier" routine, why wouldn't Confed have plans during the Kilrathi War for new Carriers (they appartenly had a new line of fleet carriers coming on line at the end of End Run).
Even if Confed *did* have another carrier that fulfilled the same purpose as the Concordia-class, it wouldn't really make sense for it to be a Vesuvius. The ICIS manual specifically gives Vampires to *heavy* fleet carriers (which the Concordia-class is not), and the game would certainly imply that Eisen carries *multiple* wings of fighters -- since she gives Midway the Wolfpack and then moves *ahead* of her to fight the bugs.
Confed *was* presumably working on a new class of carrier during the war... the Vesuvius.
There were only eight years between Wing 4 and Prophecy (2673 to 2681).
So to make a long story shorter (too late), I still don't understand why Confed would just stop producing their wartime/post-wartime carriers to just concentrate on building Vesuvius-class vessels. If they didn't, then why is it not logical that the Eisen could have been a heavy Fleet carrier designed during/at the end/or just after the Kilrathi War that Confed produced until after WC4 and designated one the TCS Eisen after he retired. I think it holds about as much water as saying that the Eisen is a Vesuvius class carrier.
Well, it wasn't really their *choice* to stop producing war era carriers -- the Kilrathi whacked the hell out of their shipyards in 2668...
Oh by the way, it is said that the Vampire flies from only heavy carriers, I was just curious to what this limitation is based on (and don't tell me the ICIS manual, I'm looking for a logical reason). I mean the Vampire isn't a large fighter by any means the way a devastator is, I don't think it's that much more advanced than the Panther, just a diffent design on the same principle. So why limit the Vampire to only heavy carriers? There are exceptions to every rule.
As we see in End Run, a carriers deck size limits what classes of fighters it can carry -- the Tarawa couldn't carry Broadswords, for instance.
The opening scene of Secret Ops begins with a presentaion by a senator talking about taking possession of Cerberus, Bartok Designs FIRST quick strike assault crusier. Although it does seem odd that it wasn't named Hades, being it was the first ship in its class
Here's SO fiction that says otherwise:
http://www.secretops.com/episodes/1_1b_d_icis.html . The Hades was the test ship.