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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20954 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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I think there's also a habit in some places to classify larger ships that would generally be termed "destroyer" due to their anti-air and/or anti-submarine capabilities as "frigates" because that sounds less scary.

At the risk of dramatic oversimplification, I think in modern parlance (at least in the west) there's been a tendency to use "frigate, destroyer" and perhaps "cruiser" to mean "small, medium, and large" because the trend is for ~all ships to have at least limited multirole capabilities. Unless someone was calling something a "frigate" to be politically correct, I cannot think of any ships in the recent past labeled frigates that were designed to be larger than the contemporary destroyers in their own fleet, and likewise the cruisers have always been larger than contemporary destroyers.

I think there's also a habit in some places to classify larger ships that would generally be termed "destroyer" due to their anti-air and/or anti-submarine capabilities as "frigates" because that sounds less scary.

Japan goes even further - they call their aircraft carriers destroyers!

EDIT: Though apparently they've been upgraded to cruisers.

That's because of something something "defensive weapons only" in their constitution, right?

The Russians also designated their carriers "aircraft carrying cruisers" due to the Montreux Convention, which is pretty funny, although in fairness the Soviets put substantial anti-ship armament on said ships.

Unless someone was calling something a "frigate" to be politically correct, I cannot think of any ships in the recent past labeled frigates that were designed to be larger than the contemporary destroyers in their own fleet, and likewise the cruisers have always been larger than contemporary destroyers.

Although sometimes a "destroyer will be larger than the current "cruisers" (but not any cruisers in production, granted, since there are none atm, and CG(X) would have been larger than the Zumwalts). A lot of it is political, as you said -- people have different reactions to different ship "classes" (see also: the Trump-class "Battleship" which, granted, is designed to be f-off huge).

the Trump-class "Battleship"

It is big, but isn't this thing a bit light on the firepower?

I've seen a lot of discussion about that, with various ideas tossed around, but this is all just aimless speculation so far.

Some people say they just made it big to appeal to Trump's ego, with no real thought behind it. In that line of thinking, the extra tonnage is just a mistake.

Some people say, it's a work in progress. The extra size can easily be filled up with more missiles like the old "arsenal ship" concepts with 500 missiles.

Some people say, it's a political maneuver to get Congress to fund what they really want, which is a future Cruiser/Destroyer. So just take that armament, but away the excess tons, and call it a destroyer/cruiser.

Some people say, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra tonnage. It's relatively cheap to build extra steel with nothing fancy inside of it, and it adds room for future improvements to the ship. It's proposed with three untested weapons systems (high energy lasers, railgun, and hypersonic missiles), and maybe nukes, so they might as well wait a bit to see how those shake up before committing to any one big weapon system. Some extra tonnage also helps a bit with survivability, which makes it a bit more of a real "battleship."

Some people say, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra tonnage. It's relatively cheap to build extra steel with nothing fancy inside of it, and it adds room for future improvements to the ship.

My understanding that an issue we are currently hitting with the Burke class is that we basically kept throwing new systems on there (we also increased the size of the ship over time, the first ships in the class didn't even have a helicopter hangar) until we basically tapped out the potential.

Yeah, it makes sense. Reading Bean's blog, i got the sense that the reason the Burke class was so successful was that they designed it with enough space to handle decades of future upgrades, but that's really tapped out now.

I think a lot of people were claiming it had fewer VLS per tonnage than anticipated, but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw some degree of "right-sizing" before it's executed.

If the Navy can get a railgun to really work the firepower will be terrifying.

Nuclear-powered warships with banks of railguns is my personal dream.

The Navy hasn't returned my calls in a very long time.

Yeah I am disappointed that they don't seem interested in putting reactors in. I guess there are good reasons, with the new propulsion methods, not to do that, but it makes sense to me to have a class of nuclear-powered cruiser escorts designed to accompany carriers. And if railguns and/or lasers Become Real, it would be simple enough to reload their munitions at sea.

(You can reload VLS cells at sea anyway, it's just painful, but a larger ship would probably be able to do that regardless if you wanted it to.)

it makes sense to me to have a class of nuclear-powered cruiser escorts designed to accompany carriers

That was a thing. The US got rid of it because, effectively, they couldn't put a mathematical value on "does not need to refuel and has basically unlimited range at max speed".

Zumwalt

Man I always complete forget that the Zumwalt exists. Pretty fair to compare them to the Tico, I think, so that is at least a halfway good counterexample and probably a decent illustration of @Lizzardspawn's point.

Although it kinda seems like we should class them as a monitor, given their intended function.

Man I always complete forget that the Zumwalt exists

Yeah, it's a stealth ship, that's how it works.

Lockheed Martin be like "okay but how do we market...what kind of countermeasure was it again?"

"Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, seriously, what the hell is it?"

It's like they started out with a submarine then forgot what they were doing half-way through.

Weirdly, it was originally meant to replace battleships... specifically the part where they have big guns that fire explosives a very long distance & are cheaper than missiles.

Then creep and cancellation and (lack of) economy of scale meant the Advanced Gun System projectiles would cost around $1m each...

This also explains the protracted and expensive development of the F-35 and the decision of the DoD to put all of their chips on it: they were very confident the secret sauce would work, whatever it was!

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