Vessel Class File
Federation Cruiser Line
The first true warship in the Federation inventory. Everything below her delivers something. The cruiser is the thing being delivered.
Registry Summary
The Line Between Delivery and Combat
Everything beneath the cruiser exists to put something somewhere. A corvette carries pilots. A frigate carries drones. Neither can hurt a warship, and neither is meant to.
The cruiser is where that stops being true. She is the smallest hull the Federation builds that carries a magazine worth firing, armour worth wearing, and shields worth powering. She does not deliver a weapon. She is one.
This is why the Guided Missile variant exists here and not below. SCG works for the same reason SFFG does not: displacement. At cruiser scale a missile battery is a threat rather than a gesture.
Manoeuvre — The Inversion
The most counterintuitive fact in the Federation inventory: a cruiser can outmanoeuvre a fighter.
She is hundreds of times the size of an F-401 and she will still out-turn one. The reason is not thrust. It is inertial stabilization.
A fighter pilot cannot pull a turn his body will not survive. A cruiser’s crew are held in a compensated hull and never feel most of it, so her limit is structural, and structure tolerates far more than tissue.
Observed performance: a 17 G burn, sustained and under control. Three times a frigate’s ceiling, in a hull hundreds of times the mass.
The small ship is not the agile one. The small ship is the one whose crew break first.
Armament
A single volley from an Alliance light cruiser, the smallest of the line, struck the WarpStar’s fourth engine and did considerable damage. That is the floor of cruiser firepower, not the ceiling.
Defence
A corvette watching a cruiser at close range could read nothing through her shields at all. Frequency analysis requires the shields to be damaged first, which requires surviving long enough to damage them.
Sensor Signature
A cruiser is identified before she is seen.
Fleet Role
The cruiser is the Navy’s line of battle in every engagement short of a capital action.
Federation Neptune Defence
4 battleships, 13 cruisers, 20 destroyers, 11 frigates.
Legion Pursuit Force
1 dreadnought, 2 carriers, 7 battleships, 13 cruisers, 12 destroyers.
The Ratio
Both fleets field cruisers at roughly three to one against battleships. She is the hull a navy has enough of to lose.
Doctrine
Cruisers concentrate. They do not duel. Standard practice is to mass fire from multiple hulls onto one target, and the counter-practice is to identify which cruiser in a group is doing the most damage and kill that one first.
Against Heavier Ships
That pair of facts is the whole doctrine. A cruiser cannot fight a capital ship. Enough cruisers can kill one, and a navy that has thirteen of them does not need to win the duel.
Archive Assessment
The cruiser is the ship the Federation actually fights with.
Battleships are rare and dreadnoughts rarer. Juggernauts number five in total. The cruiser is the heaviest hull that exists in quantity, and she is consequently the ship that does most of the dying and most of the killing.
She is also the point at which the fleet stops apologising for itself. Below her, every hull is defined by what it cannot do. The corvette cannot move. The frigate cannot fight. The cruiser has no such caveat. She carries a magazine, wears armour, holds a shield that cannot be read through, and out-turns a fighter while doing it.
Return to Archive
Continue through the Fleet Registry or review the hull designation standard.