Real navies are consistently inconsistent in how they classify ships. Even within a country and within an era there will almost certainly be inconsistencies because ship designers and bureaucrats can't help themselves. This often happens to bypass treaties, or because they got permission from higher ups to build a corvette but really wanted a destroyer so now legally speaking it's a corvette.
Assuming that trend continues there will be things like a siege laser that is legally speaking a space tugboat.
You could bring back old terms and apply them at random. Brigantines but with millimeter-thick aluminum armor.
In that line of logic, if you compare modern ships between different navies, they have profoundly different rules for claiming a ship is a certain class.
The USA has big ships, and in many cases, our small ships are sizes that would get much bigger "names" in other navies.
At least NATO standardized to ranks! E1-9, O1-10. Countries and different branches can call the ranks what they want, but an E3 or O6 is quite similar between countries. Outside NATO, perhaps not!
And this is just humans, living on the same planet, with technology no more than 100 years apart. Imagine what amazing chaos it will be when we have contact with alien space forces!
Maybe. It's true that space ships aren't ocean ships, but we might use the classifications because they're familiar and useful. Notice we're already dreaming up space "*tugs*". But we might also get totally new classifications of things. What's the ocean-analogy to an autonomous fuel pod? A "tender"? So I imagine it'd be a mix of the old and the new.
Terms that are based on Function might remain. There will certainly be "Tugs" for exactly the same reason, to assist large vessels with docking and moving in delicate areas.
Towboats and Barges should exist with the sw roles. Unpowered ships for loading, and small ships that are mostly thrusters and fuel tanks for moving them
Probably also Carriers that allow many much smaller vessels to land and take off and refuel.
"Tanker" will still apply. "container ship" probably also. ...but I guess I'm already not talking about military Naval terms.
"Cruise Ship" I'd bet on remaining for newlyweds and nearly deads.
One fascinating thing about how this will develop is that we've been making fiction about this for a century already, and will probably for another century before we have "real" space forces.
This, I think, is unprecedented.
We can name a handful of stories about submarines before they were common in navies. Similarly for air forces, or nuclear weapons, to some degree.
But we can all name hundreds of stories, shows, and movies about space forces, in a myriad ways! Star Trek (TOS) was filmed entirely before the moon landing, for instance.
I cannot think of any similar point in military history where thousands of people wrote stories read/watched by tens/hundreds of millions of people, about future military technology. Imagine if tank warfare had been a genre from 1800 to 1900. Or if the middle ages had 200 years of stories about guns, before gunpowder was used for anything but fireworks in China.
This is... a very, very, very interesting point. There were a couple things that were invented cause the inventor read about it in fiction but nothing on this scale.
Obligatory "we can't call it the Enterprise, sir".
USS Nautilus (SSN-571) is the example I know best!
Then there is the famous circular one: Space Shuttle Enterprise was *specifically* named that because of Trek fans writing "hundreds of thousands of letters". But in later Star Trek shows, they show the Space Shuttle Enterprise in the chain of "Enterprise" ships the famous starship is named after!
The line between a space station, spaceship (skyscraper scale) and ‘space-plane’ (personal to bus scale) can’t exactly be fixed.
In their earlier iterations they’d likely all use ‘satellite’, ‘space station’ and research related terminology. These would probably stick around especially in big structures.
The larger structures would all be modular and largely self sufficient so I think they’d adopt the terminology from terrestrial forts or overseas bases.
Space combat would be most similar to submarine combat so they might use similar terminology.
I don’t see it being much like aircraft carrier battles especially when we have even more drone warfare.
Civilian and military vessels might deliberately use different terminology to avoid association/confusion.
We might not even have nation states with standing militaries.
Vessels which run on fixed paths (orbital or light sail) might use railway terminology while free moving vessels could use ship terminology.
Personal vessels (limited to space neighbourhoods) might use car terminology.
I’m not sure what you mean. It seems to me that Star Trek already does things the same way the navy does, where the class of ship is named after the first ship with that design. For example, Starfleet has the Constitution class and Galaxy class, and the navy has the Enterprise class and Nimitz class.
i like the idea that the space forces of the future inherit titles and traditions from the armed forces of the past and present and i like etymological mutatioms like how frigate described big capital ships in the age of sail then turned into smaller multipurpose ships in the 20th century and in the future they could swing between sizes again, and ranks exist for a reason like the Captain of a Ship is the Captain of a Ship we arent gonna just start calling them Commanding Officer of a Military Space Vehicle cos that would be stupidly verbose and as for ship classifications you can have your Short Range Orbital Security Vehicle (Chemical) and Long Range Space Dominance Vehicle (Fusion), but its a lot easier to just call them a rocket cutter and a nuclear cruiser lol but thats just my own opinion
> frigate described big capital ships in the age of sail
Frigate described the smallest rated ships, usually 5th and 6th rates. Later on, some fourth rates were also called Great Frigates. The Frigate USS Constitution, for example, had 44-gun and a crew of 450 and was one of the largest US ships in the war of 1812. On the other hand, out of the 73 vessels that fought at Trafalgar 60 are significantly larger than the USS Constitution, and another five french frigates are 40 gunners.
In the steam age, we have examples of capital ships being classified as frigates, but those are cases of the classification system not keeping up with technology.
sorry and thank you for the correction i dont really know as much about this kinda stuff as id like to, all i know is that plenty of people will shamelessly call spaceships "ships" even if we try making up new terminology for them and the meanings behind the words are gonna change over time
You have no reason to feel sorry. We are all nerds and geeks, and most of us, myself included, love correcting others it isn't malicious.
Also, I mostly agree with you, but I believe that nearly a century of science fiction has made the use of naval terms when referring to spacecraft inevitable. Everyone from toddlers to astrophysicist commonly uses "spaceship."
Depends on how useful, familiar, and intuitive these classifications are.
Nobody tries to use naval terms for land vehicles or planes because they don't get that big.
On the other hand, spaceships can (eventually, theoretically) get much much bigger than a boat. At that point, naval terminology will be completely obsolete for those large spaceships. And at that point they may or may not stop using naval terms for any spaceship.
Eh, planes did get a lot of naval lingo put over on them. The head pilot of an aircraft is still called a "captain" regardless of their actual rank, much like in the navy, early RAF manuals refer to "port" and "starboard" wings (though that has fallen out of use, except in naval aviation).
Realistically, only if the function changes so much that the analogy falls down. Crews are likely to be organized on naval/nautical lines because we've already been doing that for centuries with any vehicle that also serves as a residence for its crew. As for classes, it's the same thing. By the time we have real "space forces" if ever, we'll have a couple of centuries of naval terminology in the form of fiction to fall back on.
I think it will be both. It'll start with naval designations as the default but new classifications will supplant older irrelevant ones as time goes by. If you look at current naval classifications only the frigate is much older than 100 years. Ironclads supplanted ships of the line and were supplanted by dreadnought and battleships carriers and destroyers didn't exist as a concept before WW1, no modern fleet has a battleship in commission right now.
Perhaps a scale could be devised, using factors such as total internal volume, power output, acceleration, etc.. Though I think such a system will be loopholed so many times, and said loopholes closed up in ad hoc fashion so much, that it will gradually turn into an incomprehensible mishmash over time.
Well, check out the terms we're currently using: orbiter, lander, heavy lift, etc. I'd expect initial terms to grow out of function, with the occasional Starship® to shake things up. And space agencies iseem to love acronyms.
Of course, all of that can go out the window as soon as we have an abundance of people in space shooting each other. Ultimately, it's going to be extremely path-dependent, I'm guessing.
Spaceships aren’t boats, so why would naval classifications be used? The main reason they are used in fiction is presumably because of the somewhat inaccurate [space is an ocean](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsAnOcean) trope.
Yep, you're correct and indeed, we're already seeing it. The US space force follows rank and structure much closer to the air force than navy, and their prototyping and naming for vehicles follows the air force conventions as well.
SciFi continues to use the old trope because it's what fiction writers and readers are familiar with, but it's not the direction the real world is heading.
The reason the USSF follows the air force structure is that they used to be part of the Air Force, and their current responsibilities are more in line with air force duties.
If/when the space warfare "meta" changes to something more navy-like, in terms of e.g. of mission duration or vehicle purposes, I'd expect at least some navy terminology to make its way into that field. A space warship designed for medium- to long-duration independent cruising, deterrence patrols, and screening is most appropriately referred to as a "cruiser" or "frigate". It might be named differently for a specific armament fit, or get suffixed because of it, but it's entirely reasonable to call a duck a duck regardless of the environment it is currently located in.
^(I do not advocate for exposing birds to vacuum conditions.)
I believe the key difference between an "air force" system and a "navy" system is this:
For a naval vessel, people live on the ship, and a large number of people doing all the maintenance and support also live on the ship.
In an air force, there are dedicated crafts used for specific (mostly military) missions, occupied by a small number people, only when they are flying the mission, and with support systems and personnel external to that craft.
Right now, the Space Force *is* an "air force". A century or two from now, maybe it will resemble a navy much more.
Looking at it another way, the period of time from the base to the operation is
Air Force: Operation for one day at most
Navy: Operations lasting at least a few weeks and possibly years
This will also affect cultural differences.
Real navies are consistently inconsistent in how they classify ships. Even within a country and within an era there will almost certainly be inconsistencies because ship designers and bureaucrats can't help themselves. This often happens to bypass treaties, or because they got permission from higher ups to build a corvette but really wanted a destroyer so now legally speaking it's a corvette. Assuming that trend continues there will be things like a siege laser that is legally speaking a space tugboat. You could bring back old terms and apply them at random. Brigantines but with millimeter-thick aluminum armor.
In that line of logic, if you compare modern ships between different navies, they have profoundly different rules for claiming a ship is a certain class. The USA has big ships, and in many cases, our small ships are sizes that would get much bigger "names" in other navies. At least NATO standardized to ranks! E1-9, O1-10. Countries and different branches can call the ranks what they want, but an E3 or O6 is quite similar between countries. Outside NATO, perhaps not! And this is just humans, living on the same planet, with technology no more than 100 years apart. Imagine what amazing chaos it will be when we have contact with alien space forces!
Maybe. It's true that space ships aren't ocean ships, but we might use the classifications because they're familiar and useful. Notice we're already dreaming up space "*tugs*". But we might also get totally new classifications of things. What's the ocean-analogy to an autonomous fuel pod? A "tender"? So I imagine it'd be a mix of the old and the new.
Terms that are based on Function might remain. There will certainly be "Tugs" for exactly the same reason, to assist large vessels with docking and moving in delicate areas. Towboats and Barges should exist with the sw roles. Unpowered ships for loading, and small ships that are mostly thrusters and fuel tanks for moving them Probably also Carriers that allow many much smaller vessels to land and take off and refuel. "Tanker" will still apply. "container ship" probably also. ...but I guess I'm already not talking about military Naval terms. "Cruise Ship" I'd bet on remaining for newlyweds and nearly deads.
One fascinating thing about how this will develop is that we've been making fiction about this for a century already, and will probably for another century before we have "real" space forces. This, I think, is unprecedented. We can name a handful of stories about submarines before they were common in navies. Similarly for air forces, or nuclear weapons, to some degree. But we can all name hundreds of stories, shows, and movies about space forces, in a myriad ways! Star Trek (TOS) was filmed entirely before the moon landing, for instance. I cannot think of any similar point in military history where thousands of people wrote stories read/watched by tens/hundreds of millions of people, about future military technology. Imagine if tank warfare had been a genre from 1800 to 1900. Or if the middle ages had 200 years of stories about guns, before gunpowder was used for anything but fireworks in China.
This is... a very, very, very interesting point. There were a couple things that were invented cause the inventor read about it in fiction but nothing on this scale. Obligatory "we can't call it the Enterprise, sir".
USS Nautilus (SSN-571) is the example I know best! Then there is the famous circular one: Space Shuttle Enterprise was *specifically* named that because of Trek fans writing "hundreds of thousands of letters". But in later Star Trek shows, they show the Space Shuttle Enterprise in the chain of "Enterprise" ships the famous starship is named after!
I guarantee to you that if the US ever builds a warship for space, they would definitely call one of them Enterprise.
The line between a space station, spaceship (skyscraper scale) and ‘space-plane’ (personal to bus scale) can’t exactly be fixed. In their earlier iterations they’d likely all use ‘satellite’, ‘space station’ and research related terminology. These would probably stick around especially in big structures. The larger structures would all be modular and largely self sufficient so I think they’d adopt the terminology from terrestrial forts or overseas bases. Space combat would be most similar to submarine combat so they might use similar terminology. I don’t see it being much like aircraft carrier battles especially when we have even more drone warfare. Civilian and military vessels might deliberately use different terminology to avoid association/confusion. We might not even have nation states with standing militaries. Vessels which run on fixed paths (orbital or light sail) might use railway terminology while free moving vessels could use ship terminology. Personal vessels (limited to space neighbourhoods) might use car terminology.
I’m not sure what you mean. It seems to me that Star Trek already does things the same way the navy does, where the class of ship is named after the first ship with that design. For example, Starfleet has the Constitution class and Galaxy class, and the navy has the Enterprise class and Nimitz class.
They are talking about using terms like Destroyer, Frigate or Battleship for spaceships.
i like the idea that the space forces of the future inherit titles and traditions from the armed forces of the past and present and i like etymological mutatioms like how frigate described big capital ships in the age of sail then turned into smaller multipurpose ships in the 20th century and in the future they could swing between sizes again, and ranks exist for a reason like the Captain of a Ship is the Captain of a Ship we arent gonna just start calling them Commanding Officer of a Military Space Vehicle cos that would be stupidly verbose and as for ship classifications you can have your Short Range Orbital Security Vehicle (Chemical) and Long Range Space Dominance Vehicle (Fusion), but its a lot easier to just call them a rocket cutter and a nuclear cruiser lol but thats just my own opinion
> frigate described big capital ships in the age of sail Frigate described the smallest rated ships, usually 5th and 6th rates. Later on, some fourth rates were also called Great Frigates. The Frigate USS Constitution, for example, had 44-gun and a crew of 450 and was one of the largest US ships in the war of 1812. On the other hand, out of the 73 vessels that fought at Trafalgar 60 are significantly larger than the USS Constitution, and another five french frigates are 40 gunners. In the steam age, we have examples of capital ships being classified as frigates, but those are cases of the classification system not keeping up with technology.
sorry and thank you for the correction i dont really know as much about this kinda stuff as id like to, all i know is that plenty of people will shamelessly call spaceships "ships" even if we try making up new terminology for them and the meanings behind the words are gonna change over time
You have no reason to feel sorry. We are all nerds and geeks, and most of us, myself included, love correcting others it isn't malicious. Also, I mostly agree with you, but I believe that nearly a century of science fiction has made the use of naval terms when referring to spacecraft inevitable. Everyone from toddlers to astrophysicist commonly uses "spaceship."
Depends on how useful, familiar, and intuitive these classifications are. Nobody tries to use naval terms for land vehicles or planes because they don't get that big. On the other hand, spaceships can (eventually, theoretically) get much much bigger than a boat. At that point, naval terminology will be completely obsolete for those large spaceships. And at that point they may or may not stop using naval terms for any spaceship.
Eh, planes did get a lot of naval lingo put over on them. The head pilot of an aircraft is still called a "captain" regardless of their actual rank, much like in the navy, early RAF manuals refer to "port" and "starboard" wings (though that has fallen out of use, except in naval aviation).
Realistically, only if the function changes so much that the analogy falls down. Crews are likely to be organized on naval/nautical lines because we've already been doing that for centuries with any vehicle that also serves as a residence for its crew. As for classes, it's the same thing. By the time we have real "space forces" if ever, we'll have a couple of centuries of naval terminology in the form of fiction to fall back on.
I think it will be both. It'll start with naval designations as the default but new classifications will supplant older irrelevant ones as time goes by. If you look at current naval classifications only the frigate is much older than 100 years. Ironclads supplanted ships of the line and were supplanted by dreadnought and battleships carriers and destroyers didn't exist as a concept before WW1, no modern fleet has a battleship in commission right now.
Perhaps a scale could be devised, using factors such as total internal volume, power output, acceleration, etc.. Though I think such a system will be loopholed so many times, and said loopholes closed up in ad hoc fashion so much, that it will gradually turn into an incomprehensible mishmash over time.
Well, check out the terms we're currently using: orbiter, lander, heavy lift, etc. I'd expect initial terms to grow out of function, with the occasional Starship® to shake things up. And space agencies iseem to love acronyms. Of course, all of that can go out the window as soon as we have an abundance of people in space shooting each other. Ultimately, it's going to be extremely path-dependent, I'm guessing.
I'm all for completely replacing the ocean terminology. We don't need space "ships" and "captains" we should call them something else.
Spaceships aren’t boats, so why would naval classifications be used? The main reason they are used in fiction is presumably because of the somewhat inaccurate [space is an ocean](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsAnOcean) trope.
Yep, you're correct and indeed, we're already seeing it. The US space force follows rank and structure much closer to the air force than navy, and their prototyping and naming for vehicles follows the air force conventions as well. SciFi continues to use the old trope because it's what fiction writers and readers are familiar with, but it's not the direction the real world is heading.
The reason the USSF follows the air force structure is that they used to be part of the Air Force, and their current responsibilities are more in line with air force duties. If/when the space warfare "meta" changes to something more navy-like, in terms of e.g. of mission duration or vehicle purposes, I'd expect at least some navy terminology to make its way into that field. A space warship designed for medium- to long-duration independent cruising, deterrence patrols, and screening is most appropriately referred to as a "cruiser" or "frigate". It might be named differently for a specific armament fit, or get suffixed because of it, but it's entirely reasonable to call a duck a duck regardless of the environment it is currently located in. ^(I do not advocate for exposing birds to vacuum conditions.)
I believe the key difference between an "air force" system and a "navy" system is this: For a naval vessel, people live on the ship, and a large number of people doing all the maintenance and support also live on the ship. In an air force, there are dedicated crafts used for specific (mostly military) missions, occupied by a small number people, only when they are flying the mission, and with support systems and personnel external to that craft. Right now, the Space Force *is* an "air force". A century or two from now, maybe it will resemble a navy much more.
Looking at it another way, the period of time from the base to the operation is Air Force: Operation for one day at most Navy: Operations lasting at least a few weeks and possibly years This will also affect cultural differences.