Space Opera: Ship Categories

The next step for the Space Opera is Starships and their classifications. This one should be pretty easy to do since I was planning on initially just using ships from existing sources anyways.

Ships will be broken down into a handful of categories; Fighters, Freighters, Cruisers, Capital Ships, and Superships. Primarily this setting will be dealing with the first four categories. The Supership category is just there in case I feel a need to use it someday long down the road.

Fighters are small ships that tend to be fast, maneuverable, cramped, and tend to be short-range. This category also includes sub-categories that would be the equivalent of Naval PT boats, a ship like the Delta Flyer or a Danube-class Runabout in Star Trek, or an X-Wing or Skipray Blastboat in Star Wars. These are the smallest classes of ships and are usually armed with weapons that fire in a small, sometimes fixed arc. Almost everything in this class can be effectively flown with a single pilot. The larger ships may need two pilots, usually a pilot and gunner team, to be fully effective.

Freighters are larger than Fighters but smaller than Cruisers. Freighters are the most common ship type out there with the largest variety available. Large enough to actually have a “crew” and typically designed to not only haul cargo and passengers, they also fill many different roles in militaries. These are the types of ships that are based off of the Millennium Falcon and the Serenity. A hardy, independent, deep space transport vessel that has a lot of potential setting/story hooks. Some are combat oriented, some are scout ships, some act as personnel/cargo transports, other are smugglers, and so one and so forth.

Cruisers are larger than Freighters. Cruisers fill roles similar to the modern military equivalents of Frigates, Destroyers, Littoral Combat Ships, Cruisers, and other similarly sized vessels. This also includes your Bulk Freighters and other common large transport vessels. Equivalent ships would be Nebulon-B frigates and Correlian Corvettes in Star Wars, or the Defiant and a Klingon Bird of Prey in Star Trek. In a military sense these ships will fill an escort role or a specific niche in a larger fleet.

Capital Ships are your truly impressive ships. These are your Star Destroyers, your Enterprises, your Mimbari Sharlin Battleships, and your EVE Battleships. These have a very large variety of sizes (depending upon the series they originate from, with Star Trek’s being the smallest), but they all fulfill a similar role. They are the heart of a fleet. These are the big, important ships that will carry entire fighter command wings, massive invasion forces, countless weapons, and all the other cool things you expect from gigantic ships in a Sci-Fi setting. Civilian ships of this size tend to be the rarer Mega-Transports or Starliners. Those are essentially the Super Tankers and Mega-cruise ships of the sci-fi world and as big as civilian ships get.

The Superships category is reserved for the greatest ships of the types of ships you’d think of as Superships. We’re talking Ships about the size of a Super Star Destroyer and larger. If these types of ships exist in this setting they will be rare and restricted to the military almost exclusively. These are the engines of war that can bring ruin to entire fleets of lesser ships on their own. If I do include them for whatever reason in a story, they will likely be set-pieces with no real stats to speak of because there is no way in hell I’d let PCs have something strong enough to take something like this on…

Next time I think I might start looking at a couple alien race ideas.