According to sources like Britannica and the OED, the design philosophy of the “dreadnought” inaugurated by HMS Dreadnought is essentially dead. The use of big guns of one caliber in the early twentieth century was born of the need to penetrate the improved, thicker armor of ships. Concurrent experience proving long-range attacks to be quite effective in turn diminished the importance of armaments used in short-range battles. In addition, it was problematical anyway to use guns of different calibers because during an engagement it was always hard to tell which shells, and thus which guns, had caused the splashes/misses that were key to targeting. This strategy of “bigger is better” was relatively short-lived however–at first wearied by successive efforts to build larger and still heavier battleships (mirrored in the linguistic travails of “dreadnoughts” yielding to “super-dreadnoughts”), and finally overtaken by the improved weaponry of carrier-based aircraft at the end of WWII.
Given that history, it’s hard to say how the word would or should be applied in the WC universe. But in-universe terms like “super-cruiser” and “super-dreadnought”, taken together with TC’s observations about the specific ships, certainly suggest that the word is similarly failing to hold onto a technical definition.
Regarding the length of the Concordia-class carrier, a relevant passage from The Price of Freedom that may or may not be a personal observation by Blair is: The [Vesuvius] carriers looked to be about twice the length of the Concordia, which had been one of the largest CVs in the Fleet before it had been destroyed over Earth. (Hmm. Earth.)
I have to say, though, that I’ve wondered if the Concordia-class towards the end of the War underwent a redesign similar to that of the Bengal-class in and around 2642 (perhaps resulting, among other things, in a new length). I’m thinking of Blair’s repeated references in The Price of Freedom, first as to the Lexington and then later regarding the Princeton, that the Concordia-class and Confederation-class shared the same internal design, at least in part. So the question becomes which “borrowed” from the other? (Was this possibly one aftermath of the Confederation-class being discontinued due to the failure of the PTC?) In this regard, Eisen makes an interesting comment (p.57) about the rebuilding of the Lexington from its “dead hull” following the Battle of Terra: “It turned out that it would have been cheaper just to scrap what was left and start over.” No persuasive proof of a redesign, necessarily, but still intriguing. (For what it’s worth, I’ve even wondered whether, if there were a redesign, the Winterrowd underwent such a refit. I’ve always found the comment in Privateer about the destroyed carrier–that it “wasn’t all she was cracked up to be”–curious, considering that the ship, if it was the same ship, dated back to the time of WC1. Again, no real proof of anything, but interesting.)
That was my POV.
