Space naval ships and roles

[rhoenix]

After some conversations with General Havoc, I realized I need to metaphorically get off my lazy ass and start writing again, especially if I want to become good enough as a writer to do some of my story ideas justice.

So, I decided to run with my sci-fi story. However, I'm having trouble with the ships of the space navy.

For ease of conversation, let's take the ships of Freespace 2 as an example, since I'm familiar with the universe, and the ships of the three factions are diverse enough to serve as a good example.

For each of the three races, there are fighters, bombers, transports & freighters, cruisers, corvettes, capital ships, and miscellaneous ships.

Out of the above-mentioned warships, there appear to be only four basic categories - parasite craft, cruisers, corvettes, and capital ships. However, the capital ships of each faction vary pretty widely as to size, armament, and role, which is only deepening my confusion here.

So, after this long-winded explanation, my question - given that the scifi universe I'm going to be playing with will be somewhat similar to the Freespace 2 universe, which will include fighters, let's say you're a ship designer for the fleet.

How would you design the categories of ships overall? How would each category of ship be shown in ship class, per category? If you need to reference ships of other universes, please feel free - if I'm not familiar with the universe, I'll ask questions.

Thank you in advance - this is a stumbling block for me, and I hope to learn from this enough to get this story idea moving properly.

[Destructionator XV]

Think about the missions, and from them will flow the ships.

If you bombard other planets to win wars, you will want some kind of long range planet attacker. If this is too big to keep little things off it (which I assume it is since you have fighters), you might want a little, fast thing to protect it; destroyers perhaps.

You might want things to protect yourself from these big things coming for you. Maybe a short range but powerful ship, and a fleet of shorter range protectors for it too.

The attacker will want something to go after them; maybe fighters/bombers or maybe some king of long range missile ship.

So what we have here is: carriers, fighters, planetary attack ships, destroyers - long and short range, monitors, bombers, and finally guided missile cruisers.


Or something like that.

[rhoenix]

Thank you Destructionator - you've reminded me that form follows function, and I can simply fill in the blanks from here, perhaps throwing in a few more for variety as long as it helps the story.

Of course, I must also adhere to the KISS principle.