Federation Commander

[cnuzzi]

What is the class name of the Fed Old Heavy Cruiser (OCA)? I can't find it in either the Starship Name Registry or Module MO3.

Also, was the OCA a ship which originally fought in the Earth-Romulan War, like the OCL?

[mjwest]

Without looking it up, I seem to remember the name being Alfred the Great. Could have screwed that up.

And, no, the OCA was a later development, made as competition for the CA.
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Federation Commander Answer Guy

[djdood]

Yup.

John Sickels' Fed cruisers class history article in CapLog52 cemented it as the Alfred the Great-class, after the first example built. It had previously sometimes been referred to as the "Great" class, as the only other oCA built was named Theodoric the Great (Alexander the Great was planned, but never built - the name had been used previously on a DD destroyer).

Definitely oddballs, being built during the late Middle Years and in the ramping tensions before the General War, to a hull planform that was 100 years old by that point. About the equivalent of the US Navy building a brand new WW2 New Jersey-class battleship in the modern day.
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[cnuzzi]

[djdood]

DDG-1000 Zumwalt is was supposed to fufill the role we've actually used battleships for since WW2 (shore and inland bombardment), but that class turned into a mess of a white elephant and is being re-missioned.
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[Nerroth]

As noted in SFB Module Y1 and Module Y2, the Terran light cruiser hull was one of five known hull types from the Earth shipyards which were refitted with tactical warp drive during the Early Years. However, it was the only one of the five to survive into the "modern" era.

Of the others, the Terran warp-refitted destroyer had a similar external appearance to the "modern" Federation police cutter, yet the two were quite distinct internally. In effect, the POL was an entirely new build, which happened to be designed to look like the Terran WDD.

The old Terran warp-refitted frigate, heavy cruiser, and dreadnought were, for various reasons, seen as technological dead-ends. While they served UEDOR (the United Earth Defense Organization) well in their time, they were either incapable of being improved further or impractical to do so in the face of new ship designs (such as the Republic-class YCA) entering service.

From a real-world perspective, the designs for the Terran WFF, WCA, and WDN were derived from certain ship miniatures which at the time were being produced by Iron Crown, and which were more recently available from Metal Express. (This same source inspired the fleets of the five founding species of the Inter-Stellar Concordium, which were also introduced in Module Y2.)


To go back to the OCA itself, it represents one branch along which the old Terran hull templates - or rather, those which survived into the "modern" era of tactical warp drive - might have developed.

In the Alpha Octant, the OCA was a one-off - well- two-off - which, as noted above, was deemed to be less practical to continue with for a Star Fleet already well along the path towards full-scale adoption of the "saucer-and-nacelle" dynamic.

However, when the Aurora colony vanished from Federation space in 2530 (Y130), bringing samples of CL and POL technology (along with a POL assembly yard and a CL maintenance dock) with them, the Aurorans were obliged to make the most of the Terran templates available to them. Thus, as the nascent Republic of Aurora established its own Navy, the Federation CL became the Auroran CL; the Federation POL became the Auroran frigate; and a series of newer and larger hull types, such as the Auroran armored cruiser (or CLA), would be developed for use over in the Omega Octant.
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FC Omega Discussion (v3)
FC LMC Discussion

[Mike]

Is the Aururan heavy armored cruiser the same as the alpha quadrant's oCA?
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Mike

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Sandpaper gets the job done, but makes for a lot of friction.

[Nerroth]

Not quite, though I suppose a CLA is "close enough" to an OCA to enable a miniature of the latter to stand in as the former.

The Auroran armored cruiser is somewhat smaller than the Federation old heavy cruiser; its phaser suite is aligned somewhat differently; and it has two standard and two light photons instead of the four standard photons on the OCA. Also, the Aurorans struggled to expand upon the 12-box warp engines they inherited from the CL; they were only able to build up to 14-box engines for the first CLAs (which still made them faster than most contemporary Omega cruisers). The difference is greater than, say, that between the D6 and D7, though both ships still have a move cost of 1.

The Aurorans (along with most Omega Octant empires) were slow to master "speed-30" cruiser engines. Also, given that their cruiser yard was essentially a jury-rigged maintenance dock, they built their first CLAs believing that they were simply not capable of constructing any larger vessels (such as OCAs). Two things changed for FRA cruisers in the 2573 (Y173): their Maesron allies provided technical improvements to the Auroran cruiser yard, allowing it to build newer and larger hull types; while a joint FRA-Maesron breakthrough enabled both empires to start fielding "speed-30" cruisers for the first time.

Whereas the full implications of the Auroran/Maesron warp breakthrough have yet to be spelled out in SFB (or FC) terms - though there are equivalent "warp refits" for the Koligahr, Trobrin, and Zosman SSDs in Captain's Log #50 and Captain's Log #52 - the yard enhancements led to the fielding of the Auroran battlecruiser in Y177 (2577), as well as a three-engine dreadnought a year later. Notably, while the yard enhancements could, in principle, have allowed the Aurorans to go back and revisit the OCA design (which had been known to exist prior to the transfer), the decades' worth of experience they had earned in the Omega Octant by this time had led an increasingly confident Federal Republic to take on entirely new design types instead.
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FC Omega Discussion (v3)
FC LMC Discussion