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Spacedock delves into the mighty dreadnoughts of fact and fiction.
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And was a that a clip from the game Dreadnought, I liked that game...
You missed the Twilight Imperium Dreadnaughts.
Your space frigate design kinda looks a bit like Thanos' ship
*And the Dreadnoughts dread nothing at all!!!*
🏜️
Sabaton intensifies
Fear god and dread nought.
Except the only thing they fear; *is you*
Displace the water in its path Reveal the cannons, align the guns, unleash their wrath!
In StarCraft “battlecruiser operational” sounds better than “dreadnought operational” anyway.
I think it was some TVTropes contributor that said that "battlecruiser" was such an awesome name that sci-fi writers continued to use it even after the class was proven non-viable.
Another over and misused term. Historically, battlecruiser were pretty much just glass cannons, ships with cruiser level armor but armed with battleship level guns.
@@Riceball01 this varies a lot between classes. Yes the first battlecruisers where very lightly armored, but later battlecruisers actually tended to have better armor, often sitting in between cruiser and battleship armor. German battlecruisers in particular often had armor that was quite close to battleship levels of protection and one of the last battlecruisers built, HMS hood, had armor that was basically on par with contemporary battleships. Essentially what happened was battlecruisers and battleships evolved and merged together to become fast battleships, especially as engine technology improved to allow compact but very powerful machinery. And in fact the tenacy of battlecruisers to explode under fire comes from the battle of jutland, where three british battle cruisers exploded in quick succession. However for these battlecruisers, the reasoning they exploded actually owes more to bad ammunition handling practices by the crews rather than problems with the armor itself.
@@templarw20They where actually incredibly viable, in their original role as cruiser hunter/killers (as proven by the battle against Graf Spree's cruiser squadron at the Falkland Islands). The problem was, they completed that job barely a year into the war! And as a result found themselves fighting opponents they where never supposed to fight (BCs and BBs).
Yup! And a fleet of upgraded battlecruisers can take down an equal number of any other unit in the game (excepting stealth units).
In a twist of irony, the Invictus wouldn't be legally considered a dreadnought in Mass Effect since none of it's many guns run the length of the ship. I could imagine the Systems Alliance building these and when the Council complains they respond "What's the problem? It's not a dreadnought.".
Honestly, that's a great idea for a crossover, instead of the modern Persean sector, it's an extremely young Domain of Man, still using low-tech ships with no Prothean influence, having conquered the few pre-existing human colonies that were sent out on sub-light cryosleeper ships decades and centuries ago
Also, the Alliance got around the dreadnought limitation by building fleet carriers instead, using torpedo-armed fighters over high-powered cannons. The Council can’t complain, and the Alliance navy is second only to the Turians.
@@brokenursa9986 the hilarious part is that is also almost a 1 to 1 whit WW2 history. there is a cap on the size of the ship in total tonnage and gun armament. lets build a carrier as that does not have any guns at all or small ones that are not part of the treaty. there was a trick to get a 100K tonnage carrier to be counted as a 10K tonnage destroyer (whit it having no guns or destroyer guns).
Nazi Germany be like: oh those aren't rifles, just some really long carbines!
@@CHRF-55457Scheisse, is not ein rifle, is smoothbore, ja?
As a Naval historian, my take is this: Ship designations evolve as ships evolve. Our modern pop culture conventions on classifying ships mostly relate to early 20th century naval treaties, especially the London Naval Treaty of 1930. A frigate in 1800 was similar in role to a cruiser in the steam era. Today, the cruiser role is largely occupied by destroyers in most navies. A science fiction set hundreds of years from now, or in another galaxy with different history can have entirely different naming conventions.
yes. the terms are partly out of romance of the naval warfare of the early 20th century. That is partly due to starwars. One aspect that would make a Sci-fi universe "alive" is depicting how terms evolve over time and how ships description change. The term "cruiser" for instance in how it evolved from a long range patrol wars ship to a under sized battleship to being a capitol ship in its own right, to being largely a "political term" (the Cruisers created by the US in the late 70's and 80's were named such due to a "cruiser gap" created by the US navy retiring the last of its WW2 era cruisers. Ironically mass effects term "cruiser" is the most accurate as ship that is cheap enough to afford patrol and enforcement mission while being long range and sturdy enough that small ships cannot due the role.
isn't cruiser role going back to frigates rather than destroyers? considering the primary presence and commerce protection mission profile I can only think of US and Russian (both incidentally still have cruisers but those don't perform traditional roles) and to a lesser extent the RN when it comes to using destroyers in cruiser role, with everybody else mostly sending frigates around
@@nikujaga_oishii Part of this is that "frigate" term was revived during WW2 for a cheap anti-submarine ship. basically, a cheap destroyer. However, in modern times that sometimes means they do the "traditional" role of "cursing" better since they are cheap enough for "show the flag" missions.
Even nowadays modern navies can't agree on what's a Cruiser, Destroyer or Frigate, Germany calls everything a Frigate while Japan has Helicopter Destroyers. It's only logical that different factions in a Sci-Fi setting will have different meanings for terms like Frigate and that faction A's Frigates will look nothing like faction B's Frigates.
@@josesanchezrodriguez1783 the Bundesmarine does have destroyer as part of their classification, just that the existing ships don't warrant the use of it the French, meanwhile, really does call everything a frigate - including their Forbin-class "frigate" which have standard European "D" pennant for destroyer helicopter destroyer is nothing new - like "aviation cruiser" (Russian carriers) and "through-deck cruiser" (original designation for Invincible class carriers)
More than any other ship review channel, Spacedock's presentations are far more organized, and they take the time to get their facts straight.
Scifi specifically, actual history ones do do better.
This ain't true I mess up all the time. - hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@hoojiwana You're modest, but the track record speaks otherwise. You folks should take a bow.
@@hoojiwanawhat's your worst mistake in a video?
@@-DMInteresting question! Would love to know as well - really love the channel too.. 👌
Love how parallels were drawn between Mass Effect and the Washington Navel Treaty. Fun fact, in Mass Effect humanity found a way around this by building Sci Fi's other big ship name; Super Carriers.
* youmanity
You can't have x amounts of dreadnoughts. Okay. This is a carrier, obviously...
Should be noted that other powers do have Carriers, maybe some Super Carriers so Humanity did nothing new. Turian Carriers were mentioned in the early Invasion. Hell, it is likely that Turian Carriers mass would still outweight Earth's entire Carrier fleet when they come out.
@@huntermad5668 It's eplicitly mentionet in Codex, that Humanity were the first to built dedicated carriers. Other races have fighters as an afterthought, as in shove a few fighters between armor and pressure hull of a cruiser.
@@huntermad5668 Not correct. While many ships before humanity fielded fighters, most cruisers in fact, humanity was the first to build a true carrier, a ship whose primary armament was their fighters. They also used carriers as a means of sidestepping the Treaty of Farixen, because their carriers are dreadnought weight but just with no huge mass accelerator cannon.
one of my favorite tid bits from mass effect is that Humanity limited by the council couldn't make more dreadnoughts so they just build really big carriers instead, kinda similar to real life.
Nah, carriers where limited too irl. Its just aircraft improved far more rapidly and dramatically towards the end of the 1930's (by which time pretty much everyone was ignoring the treaties anyway) then anyone had predicted. If the war had happened in 1935, even giving all sides every carrier (but only 1935 aircraft) they built/was building by/in 1945, carriers would have been pretty much useless for anything but scouting and mildly reducing enemy combat effectiveness before the battleships dujed it out (and many of the carriers would have been lost to rogue cruisers if the various fleet exercises of the time where anything to go by).
I'd say the SA cheated more by building *all* their heavy cruisers to be only 50m shorter than a Dreadnought (and with a longer/bigger gun than would normally be found on vessels of that size). They also "cheated" by cramming the carriers full of "heavy cruiser" guns.
@@hanzzel6086cheating? What you, some kind of asari spy? Of course they mounted cruiser guns on carriers, mounting dreadnought guns would be illegal of course. You say it's a slightly smaller dreadnought gun, but it'd clearly just a slightly larger cruiser gun for self defense
So instead theyre like Japan hiding the Mogami in WWII as Light Cruiser and Izumo nowadays as "Aviation Destroyer" ?
@@syaondri Pretty much yeah.
I actually shed a tear from those last few clips because the game they are from, aptly named "Dreadnought", shut down last year and I miss it dearly.
Yes, its a shame they dont put a campaign or some offline sandbox mode.
D7 captains
It was a really cool idea for a game. If only the execution of it had been a bit better I think it could have really succeeded.
I miss my Naga Corvette
They said they were workong on sometbing else. Any news yet? @AnonYmous-ys2if
The etymology of the name, fear nothing, a ship with so much armor and defense nothing can really threaten it.
Exactly. The original dresdnaughts might not be hot shit by today’s standards, but they were the first modern battleships. And when everyone else is rocking iron clad gun boats and one of those suckers comes rolling over the horizon you start shitting bricks. It makes perfect sense the a new era of navy would recycle the name for their own major innovation.
The lesson that real life dreadnoughts taught was the importance of range. The "all big guns" approach didn't improve the firepower by much, but it did improve firepower at maximum range. This was further improved by new fire control systems; since all the guns were identical you could coordinate them. Of course this principle is also way dreadnaughts become obsolete, aircraft carriers and missile ships had even longer range. Meanwhile fiction subverts this principle by including energy shields that often can only be defeated by short range weapons. This coincidentally shifts to focus back to straight forward heavy hitters rather than flexible and sophisticated snipers or deadly yet expendable fighters. The fact that a universe with energy shields means that the biggest ships (with the biggest shield generators) tend to dominate is actually surprisingly well respected.
Fun fact about 40K, Terminators are also Dreadnoughts. The armour's official name is Tactical Dreadnought Armour. On B5 the Nova-class Destroyer is classed so for political reasons but is for all practical purposes a Battleship/Carrier Hybrid. The Dreadnoughts were replaced by them because after the Dilgar and Mimbari wars, Earthforce found they needed a fighter screen, plus they had issues hitting smaller ships. It became more cost effective to roll that all into a single ship design. Also the Nova was not a missile Carrier, that was it's replacement, the Warlock. It was meant to have mines but budgetary constraints meant they were never seen on screen.
He was referring to the Omega as a missile carrier.
Starsector mentioned, let's go!
Love the Invictus from Starsector! I've even showcased how it can even hold off entire fleets of capitals and cruisers with a little help. Its one of the coolest ships in the game , a giant hulk of metal and guns.
I like how David Weber's Honor Harrington series does it. Frigate (Tiny and obsolete) 50-60k tons. Destroyer (smallest regular combatant) 75-120k tons. Light cruiser 150-200k tons. Heavy Cruiser 230-450k tons. Battlecruiser 750-1,000k tons. Battleship (obsolete) 2,000-2,500k tons. Dreadnought 6,000k tons. Super Dreadnought 8,500k tons. The wisdom in the 'Verse is that it takes at least three of the next class down to have a 50/50 chance against the higher one. So three Heavy Cruisers to take on a single Battlecruiser. Expect to lose all three attacks for crippling the bigger ship. One of the plots in the series was a lone regular navy heavy cruiser having to take on a battlecruiser crewed by untrained zealots. Even playing very smart. The heavy was still almost battered to destruction. It was a massive deal that ANY single heavy cruiser could win against a Battlecruiser and survive at all, whatever the circumstances.. Bloody scary but not invincible.
Someone beat me to the HH punch...... I wanna see a Kris Longknife version of a dreadnaught...... (Another series of you are a fan of Honor.... Pulpier, but awesome)
@@BelRigh I will have to have a look.
More to the point, one time a whole bunch of Peep cruisers stumbled across a Manty dreadnought. Unfortunately for the Peeps, the Manty was on the ball and reacted to them as it was supposed to react to any hostile force. BOOM! No more Peeps. This is just one example of why nobody wants to piss off a dreadnought.
@@seanbigay1042 TBF, that scenario with Admiral Pierre was not something that would normally happen. Noone survives point black DN energy fire unless you are a DN or bigger. Even then, IIRC, noone had their sidewalls up, as the DN was about to jump to hyper and the Peeps were just coming out of hyper. Adm Pierre getting popped is the Honorverse's Arch Duke Ferdinand moment. Look what snowballed from his death. Especially as Adm Pierre was a nobody really, unlike the Arch Duke.
And that is why Honorverse has some of the best Sci Fi battles out most universes. What got me hooked was the First Battle of Yeltsin. Seeing a Heavy Cruiser and a Destroyer having a believable battle against a Battlecruiser remains one of my fondest memories of that series.
David Weber probably gives the best explanation for the idea of calling a suped up battleship a dreadnought in his Honor Herrington series. You start out with a fully worked up fleet layout, with everything from sublight LACs (Light Attack Craft) to Destroyers, Light Cruisers, Heavy Cruisers, Battler Cruisers, and Battleships. But then, over centuries, the Battleships keep getting bigger, while the rest of the fleet stays the same size. Destroyers and Cruisers need the acceleration advantage that a small size grants them, whereas main combatants just need to be able to keep up with other "ships of the wall", which will accelerate at the highest speed of the slowest ship in the wall of battle. So as battleships got bigger, they added classifications for Dreadnoughts and Super Dreadnoughts, based on size and acceleration.
I'd love to see this channel do a video on honor Harrington, such a well thought out set of space battles. Honestly reminds me of how mass effect did its world building with E-Zero, where for all their crazy ability ships in the honor verse follow the same physics as the real world, except for the fact that humanity can manipulate gravity almost as easily as electricity. How do they have gamma ray lasers? It's because of gravity-compressed fusion reactors that basically hold miniature stars. How can they move so quickly and for so long? They just bend space around the ship using gravity fields to accelerate. Gives it a nice grounded feeling while also allowing for really cool tech
Came here to say this too
1. This is a great comment 2. Weber *is* a naval historian. :D
@@musicman24X It really showed in the Safehold books, hell after reading those I feel like I just absorbed a semester on 18th/19th century naval history, this isnt a dig at him its great
If there are people on board, acceleration would be limited to around a G, if there aren't, smaller ships wouldn't be able to accelerate faster, mostly likely larger ships would.
from a purely analytical, and world building stand point, the points you made are all good, well thought out and make sense. however, that being said, the lizard brain part of me says: "BIG SHIP GOODER."
RIP Dreadnaught. You were an awesome game, taken too soon.
Did I hear *DREADNOUGHT?!* *Heart Of Oak intensifies
The first _HMS Dreadnought_ was a 40-gon warship launched in 1558. Also, the Dreadnought didn't carry _only_ big guns, it also maintained a secondary batter of 21 12-pounder (3 inch calibre) guns for use against torpedo boats and other light craft.
As a long-term Eve online fan I can confirm that the dreadnought was first alongside the freighter but oftentimes it feels like the carriers were first just because they were more common than used and they were introduced in the update afterwards. In a lot of ways. Eve's dreadnoughts mirror the life cycle of HMS dreadnought. She was a game changer first of the new generation of warships and then she was quickly out classed and relegated to second line duty before kind of finding a new life and then finally becoming scrap. The only part that Eve online has not finished is the scrapping. Dreadnoughts change the game they morphed from siege platform to kind of anti-capital and now they're a little bit mixed in anti-sub cap and anti-capital but they are thoroughly out classed in the largest of fights
Man I miss when EVE was good.
If you have enough guys (alts) you can drop a hundred dreads into a fleet fight and do a lot of damage. Well, if the server lets you.
And then they added T2 dreads, Lancers that stop other ships from escaping, period.
Starsector is an absolute masterpiece!
I still think one of my favourite examples of this trope is the Chariots from The Last Angel (with a notable mention to Red One herself from the same series). Chariots are massive do-everything ships (as is common with the vessels of the Compact of Species) designed to be mobile operating bases, command centres, and fleet killers simultaneously. They are one of the principal reasons the Compact has conquered as much as it has uncontested. But they are so much more than that. They are a symbol of the Compact, to see one firsthand is to see the power of the Compact, its will, its strength, and its drive. Not only that, they are also the personal ships of the Triarchs, the (last remaining) founding and ruling species of the Compact of Species. They are the highest authority within the Compact. And bestowed almost something akin to divinity by the other species within the Compact.
Ah, Red One. How beautiful is her hate.
Yeah, was just about to make a similar comment that touches on this. And The Last Angel also brings up the other reason why 'Dreadnoughts' tend to be either far too common to be 'Dreadnoughts' in the historical manner, or so rare that they don't seem to 'change the meta' of a setting. That thing? Industrial capacity. Either your setting has so much industry that it can mass produce the Dreadnaughts when they are developed, which naturally causes the rest of the ship classes in the setting to redesign how they fight to make the Dreadnaughts the 'line combatant' whilst they do other things. Or your setting has whichever entities build Dreadnaughts to be making major sacrifices in other fields to support their construction. Whilst hoping that the Dreadnaughts make up for those sacrifices. All too often they aren't common enough to make that needed difference, or are deliberately taken out in carefully organised engagements that cripple the dreadnaught's advantages as much as possible early on. Which tends to have us, from an out of setting perspective, wondering why they were so significant anyway because we don't see all the plotting, planning and scheming that allowed such 'easy' victories to occur. Though if we're to respect The Last Angel appropriately, we also have to acknowledge that the big thing there preventing Chariot versus Chariot/Chariot versus Dreadnought engagements is lacking technical development. By which I mean the setting defining superpower that is the Compact deliberately goes out of their way to use their mature Dreadnaughts in the Chariots to destroy any attempt by another power to create their own Chariots or Dreadnaughts *before* they can iterate on the needed technology enough to create peer combatants.
Some cool ideas for various uses of dreadnoughts: - The Archangel Class Dreadnought (Somtaaw Dreadnought) in Homeworld Cataclysm: A missile dreadnought that was heavily armored. Probably the most realistic concept of a powerful warship in realistic sci-fi. - The dreadnoughts of Space Battleship Yamato, such as the Gamilas Dreadnought or the Andromeda Class which could carry two Wave Motion Guns into one warship. - The Titan warships of Sins of a Solar Empire.
Space Battleship Yamato actually has its own Dreadnought class ships, and they're smaller than the Yamato.
Damn...that last bit of shade thrown at Dreadnoughts at the end there... I really liked that game, alot. It was a ton of fun. Grindy and broken, but fun. RIP Dreadnought
Dammit. I thought it was about the 40K style of Dreadnought.
They have a segment on the Astartie's Walker units
I just love the design of the alliance dreadnoughts in mass effect
And in the setting of *Judge Dredd,* a _Dreadnought_ is when the titular character doesn't appear.
You forget the Wing Commander universe. The Khilrati and the Confederation both using Dreadnoughts. What's interesting is that the Kilrathi dreadnoughts are much larger and stronger than those of the humans.
I'm not sure he's aware of many games outside of 40K, Mass Effect, and Eve Online. Those get regular mentions, and while it's not a game, something from Battlestar Galactica gets a mention in practically every video, but Wing Commander rarely gets a nod, and I don't think he's ever mentioned the Homeworld setting once.
He not only knows wing commander he knows s42 / star citizen is from the same line@tba113
One other Scifi that does its "Dreandnought" sorta close to the original dreadnought idea/HMS Dreadnought is starblazers/Space Battleship Yamato with its aptly named D-, short for Dreadnought, class Battleships. Built around a wave motion gun (for those unfamiliar, with it your answer to "Enemy in X direction" is "Roger, removing that directon") as the biggest kind of gun in Setting, it changed its settings footing of space war by effectively outmatching everything prior.
In The Expanse (at least in the Books, I can't remember if the term was ever used in the Series) the Truman Class Battleships from the UNN, as well as the OPAS Behemoth and the Laconian Magnetar Class were sometimes called "Dreadnaughts" as well.
I believe the Donnager class was considered a dreadnought in the books, at the time it was the largest ship of the line for the MCRN. Laconia’s Magnatar class later in the series was ungodly in size. Thanks for mentioning one of my favorite Sci-fi series.
@@ChaoticBattleCamel Yeah I couldn't remember if the Donnager was ever called a Dreadnought. That's why I didn't include it. But it would make sense, if you'd go after the size.
Laconian ship being called a dreadnought made sense though. It took on the combined naval strength of the Sol system, beat them up until they surrendered, and got away with just having a hole in its sensor coverage.
@@hildemel Plus a hole in a small piece of it's reality... but that wasnt Sol System's doing.
For the definitive Dreadnaught starships, read David Weber's Honor Harrington series.
Starsector mentioned LETS GO!!!
And I recall the Independence War games, where in the first one at least you command a NSO-929 Dreadnaught class corvette CVN-301 Dreadnaught.
fantastic games! A dreadnaught class ship is available in I-War 2 as well, but is very outdated there.
@@fisk0 I-War 2 was a tremendous game, but I miss the 'fully crewed ship' feel that was in the original.
7:40 Crew for an Iowa class battleship was 2700 during WW2 and Korea down to 1800 during the Gulf War. Crew of the Gerald Ford class aircraft carriers is 2600 but, including airwing personnel, over 4300. So those numbers aren't excessive for a large scale ship if your setting doesn't rely on automation or robots (say if EMP was a concern for frying AI's).
Fun fact: the Iowa is official out of the mothball fleet and is undergoing modernization.
Something great about Mass Effect is how the first game shows that a dreadnaught can be defeated through sheer numbers. At first that would have been the best way to defeat them irl until carriers were put into service.
In what I've written, a battleship is a multipurpose long range capital ship, with many guns big and small to deal with any conceivable threat, while a dreadnought is a singular massive mobile gun system with extra bits tacked on.
**Hides my 100,000 lightyear long 'Final Titan' class galaxy killer** Dreadnought (20km) < Titan (50km) < Super Titan (120km) < Ultra Titan (300km) < Zeta Titan (500+ km) < Final Titan (lightyears).
*mobile galaxy intensifies* Though, the jump from a few hundred kilometres to literally trillions of kilometres (it's literally the scale difference between an ant and the diameter of earth) is extreme! Do you have any classification for ships the size in between?
@@scifidino5022 Yeah there are other sizes in between. I just listed the 'titan' line of ships. Motherships (60km-100km), Colossus class ships (130km-200km, and Eclipser class ships ( BIG pancakes lol ). The galaxy sized ship is really a massive ultra weapon that can erase galaxies in one shot. In my sci-fi the Final Titan 'Abyssor' was erased in one shot, ironically.
@@QuantumNova That's really cool! But is it like "one hull" that is literally the size of a galaxy? Or is it something like a formation? Also how do you get from one end to another?
@@scifidino5022 Okay full details. It's an organic ship powered by a few million hyper giant stars and quantum singularities. It has the stabilized quantum integrity field. This means the ship won't implode into a supermassive black hole or generate a massive gravitational field. The propulsion system are millions of 'Sharnada space' generators. The Final Titan can instantly jump to anywhere in the universe every 48 hours. 'Sharnada space' is a type of FTL travel that can move mass to any point in the universe in under 4 seconds. The population of the Final titan 'Abyssor' is 950 quadrillion alien beings. The population can travel around the ship using internal hyperspace jumps, or teleportation pads. Lastly. the Abyssor armed with a powerful weapon that can reverse the polarity of a supermassive black hole. The results is an explosion so huge it's dubbed 'Omega-Nova'. Imagine a billion stars exploding all at once. Any galaxy would be blown up in mere seconds. The explosion's expansion speed would be near instant because of 'Sharnada' infused tachyon particles. (Nerd!) Thankfully the Final Titan Abyssor was decimated by one very brave woman, saving the Milkyway Galaxy.
Starsector mentioned. Let's goooooo!
From the mighty torpedo boat destroyer to super star destroyer , look how long destroyers came
If you haven't done o already, you should do a video on battlecruisers, another type of ships that's used a lot in sci-fi but is almost always misused by just about every franchise that's used the term. It seems to be mainly used to convey a ship that's bigger and scarier than the hero ship of the franchise or simply imply a really powerful ship that's better than almost any other type of ships outside of battleships and dreadnoughts, if the franchise even has battleships and dreadnoughts.
Hell some video games such as OGame have Battlecruisers being basically upgraded Battleships that specialise in killing other Battleships.
Can´t say that I agree with the conclusion, then again, I´m a big fan of the Honorverse and there, the super dreadnought (or SD for short) is the workhorse, main ship "of the wall" for all serious types of space navies. They do go through different itterations and changes in combat doctrine and armaments though.
I always figured a Dreadnought was where you took a Battleship, traded off everything but ship-killer main guns/weapons, and uparmored it until it was basically a brick. Slow, ridiculously heavily armored, and insanely heavily armed in a VERY narrow style. Like, if it's in a space setting, it might have all heavy cannons. Or heavy energy weapons. Or if it's an Escort dreadnought, it sacrifices the majority of its big guns for frankly terrifying amounts of anti-air/anti-missile defenses so it can shield other ships by sheer dint of firepower. And Superdreadnoughts were like that... but everything doubled in scale. LOL. Except speed. The speed was still slow. But it was a Double Brick of a ship.
In my mind "dreadnaught" will always bring back fond memories of a... mere corvette. But what a fine ship the I-War Dreadnaught was !
"Dreadnoughts", in my setting, have the term and function replaced with "Fortress". Loosely defined as "A deliberately mobile space station", a Fortress is for three things 1) Taking space, 2) maintain control of that space, 3) command and control of relevant forces in that space. A proper Fortress can do all three, but in some cases, either a species, or nation is simply beyond affluent, will develop multiple types of Fortress. But said people, species or nation, will have been in such a position to do this for ages, minimally decades, having the needed arrays of resources and experience, before building even one such specialized Fortress. They are extremely high prestige vessels but rare, due to their function and necessity.
Ah yes, the Invictus aka the Flying Brick. Its doctrine is so out of the box I struggled to figure out how to use it in battle.
Thank you for remembering the steam turbines, most people only think of the change in guns, but the improvements in propulsion were just as impressive, going from 18 knots standard, with common reliability issues and issues both reaching keeping speed, to 21 knots without issues.
One particular Dreadnought that I'm interested in is 'Space Battleship Yamato' Dreadnought class. It's a clear step up from the previous mass produce pre-wave motion ship. Equipped with better tech, better weapon (yes bigger gun), better arm-..., and better engine. Making any EDF ship before it (except Yamato of course) obsolete, no Kongo class battleship can stand against it. But still, she's just the start. Eventually the EDF developed a bigger and better wave motion ship 'the Andromeda', which surpassed Dreadnought in many way other than numbers. Just like HMS Dreadnought her self. A powerful ship which revolutionized the whole fleet, but by no mean is the strongest in it.
Don't forget the Czar, a class 1 super carrier from an older game called Starlancer, that was my first introduction to big ships.
It's a quirk of history that "dreadnoughts" are even a thing. Had HMS Dreadnought been named something like HMS Lord Nelson or HMS Bellerophon (the preceding and succeeding battleship classes), we wouldn't have been calling them "nelsons" or "bellerophons". We can see that because the "dreadnought armored cruiser" concept which did the same for armored cruisers what HMS Dreadnought did for battleships isn't named after the first ship of its type (HMS Invincible) but instead a new term was created: battlecruiser. But it just so happened that HMS Dreadnought was different enough that something was needed to differentiate pre-dreadnoughts from dreadnoughts and had a name that happened to be sufficiently descriptive of the type that it leant its name to the type. This is rare (USS Monitor being the only other notable example) It'd be nice to see a fictional setting come up with a reasoning behind various types and classifications rather than just using real world terminology without understanding why the terms came about. A civilization not tied to Earth history for example might have named their first stealth vehicle something that translates to "dreadnought" because of the belief that it had nothing to fear because it couldn't be seen.
I remember in Eve Online when "Dreads" were the biggest & baddest vessel you could pilot, and the mere mention of corps building one would spark week-long conflicts. Then Super cariers & Titans basically made the dread a bigger battleship that was only good for siege missions against stations.
Been fun designing ships for my Sci-Fi. For the Sol ESF, there used to be large "capital" ships until costs and sabotage made the max ship size a battle cruiser. However, there still is one big ship, a carrier used for planetary attacks. Another faction has large ships, introduced in the first book, but there is a lore twist to them that makes them still useful to the faction to still use.
No mention of CNV Dreadnought from Independence War? That one always always got me...a "Dreadnought-class Corvette"...
HMS Warspite. A future Dreadnought-class (name of the class) submarine What's so strange about that?
Star Fleet Battles took the Franz Joseph Star Trek manual Federation dreadnought design and used it as the basis for the largest class of warships in use before the General War saw the development of the heavy dreadnoughts and the (mostly) theoretical battleship designs.
4:45 Eve player here, it's open on my other screen as I type. These kinds of dreads are called HAW dreads (High-Angle Weapon), and it requires a special fit. Siege modules are still necessary as they boost your outgoing damage and your active repair modules to mitigate incoming damage, but the weapons you'd use for siege warfare as you describe are swapped for weapons that are most like a cluster of downsized weapons that have a fast enough turn speed and can reach a high enough angle of attack (name drop) to be able to hit things flying around it. They'll still need assistance in the form of "slow the fuck down" modules and "you're really fat now" modules, but you can do it. Funny enough, the dread on screen at the time, the Phoenix, is the best for it since it fires missiles which always do damage and the amount that's actually applied to the ship is what's calculated as opposed to all the others which are turret ships and therefore have a chance of missing completely. HAW dreads are an interesting beast and the solo player's choice of capital ship, since it's a very fine line between "this is a great brawl" and "I have died within six seconds" especially if you're "bait tanking" and trying to keep them from escalating to anti-capital ships. However, even the siege dreads used in cap fights and dreadbombs still generally form the primary unit of the nullsec alliance's capital fleet; yes, the supercarriers and titans are the measure of the alliance's strength, but titans are expensive as fucc and supercarriers only somewhat less so, so if you need to escalate to a cap fight and you aren't willing to put your whole pussy into it, dreads will see you through. One alliance, Pandemic Horde (mine), actually started using dreads as a main doctrine used as if it's a subcapital, which means in effect they're chonkier battleships and not the final word in armor and firepower.
I love when space dock said a Dreadnought's name meant "Fear Nothing"
Even the word “Dreadnought” I love. Let alone what comes with that title. Fear and doom for the enemy.
"...arms race of ridiculousness..." perfectly sums up my life!😮😮😮😮😮
This is why I use the terms “super-heavy cruiser” and “super-heavy carrier” for dreadnought-style ships. Even battleships are outdated, but you could feasibly see 20km behemoth ship filling a role as a cruiser, or even taking the place of several cruisers by itself in a fleet, and likewise as a massive carrier designed to deploy thousands of fighters instead of mere dozens or hundreds.
I have always figured that the most appropriate use of the term Dreadnought would be for a class of ship that through new technology is able to bring to battle firepower superior to anything that came before, which the caveat that once such ships have been built, the soon become just the new standard of battleship. Therefore, a dreadnought doesn't realy stay a dreadnought forever.
How about the Honorverse's Dreadnaughts and Super-Dreadnaughts? Eventually replaced by Pod-naught Superdreadnaughts that again re-defined the meta with their ability to launch thousands of missiles from pods laid and tractored behind them.
For me, hearing the word dreadnought always brought to mind the idea of "ah yes, the wall of guns is here"
Which is ironic, as HMS Dreadnaut was the first battleship that WASNT a "wall of guns"
The Dreadnaught in Endless Sky is an interesting one. It's a heavily defended torpedo boat from a Free Worlds fleet. They basically give respectable defense turrets and twice the common torpedo launchers and massive cargo and outfit space, making it relatively customizable. Good shields and armor, but a sizeable crew is needed.
Happy to hear the Farscape reference- one of my all time favourite series but I don’t hear much talk of it these days and the ships don’t get a lot of love even though I think they’re all pretty creative and original. Thanks.
The thing that makes Mass Effect dreadnoughts compelling is the same thing that makes so much of the setting compelling: logical extension of the underlying technology surrounding element zero. Dreadnoughts aren't just huge ships in the Mass Effect setting because the Navy's of the galaxy just believe in the rule of cool, or that bigger always equals better, but rather because the natural extension of the technology visa-vis railguns means that you ships naturally can facilitate extremely powerful weaponry, and moreover that that powerful weaponry necessitates extremely large ships. Therefore, there's a sensible reason why fleets within the Mass Effect setting try to feel at least a handful of dreadnoughts, outside of some kind of "philosophical" dedication to large ships. I also like how Mass Effect seems to be following natural development in a very specific way, with humans showing up and bypassing restrictions on how many big ships they could have by building carriers, which seem to be supplanting battleships and dreadnoughts in several navies by the time of the third game. The aforementioned necessity of large cannons will always keep dreadnoughts relevant in Mass Effect, but just like in the real world, massive ships with big guns are seeing At least some of their importance given over to craft using fighters as their main weapons.
I love that the Invictus pretty much represents the trajectory of dreadnoughts in reality. They were massive and expensive and nobody wanted to risk them in a strategically significant deployment that increasingly involved submarines, and they were quickly superseded by aircraft carriers as the centrepieces of warfleets.
That's one of the things I do like about Honor Harrington. Yes, the dreadnaught classes are bigger than other warships, but the defining aspect of them are they carry the biggest available guns like the original ship. Two ships that outclass the DD and SD in the series are the Missle podlayers and the Light Attack Craft carriers. In fact, those two last make the DD/SD obsolete.
Using Starsector Pirate Market Friendly theme? Approved.
In Star War Armada (Supremacy) both the Super Star Destroyer and its Rebel alliance equivalent were absolute beasts that were effectively fleets by themselves. The issue was, they took so much research, resources, and time to construct and man with fighters, by the time you could afford them you'd be so far ahead of your enemy (with so few planets left to invade) you were basically trying to swat a mosquito with a 155mm shell. Still amazingly fun game. Wish they would give it a polish and remake it.
more starsector praise; im sure alex appreciates it!
actually so surprised and grateful that he brought up starsector, my newest obsession
Always nice to see Starsector get mentioned.
Another fun thing with the Treaty of Fairxen that further references its inspiration is that in order to get around its regulations the Alliance started building carriers (a novel concept in space), which are unregulated because they lack a "main gun", which the treaty lists as a defining trait of a dreadnaught
Great piece, love that you touched on 40k using it in other ways, was kind of surprised you missed the Dreadnougth class from Battletech, which was the first true warship class in that universe. Fascinating universe Battletech, you should look at it now and then, the ship tech is pretty unique.
The cool thing about mass effect dreadnoughts is also that their size was require to fit the mass accelerating gun. Basically they are build around the very lonng barrel of it. It is a cool justification for their size (as the Geth dreadnought mission show us, while a whole part of the mission you walk along the large barrel of it). as a aside Mass effect also was able to set appart each faction in the ships designs.
The subjugator class from the clone wars TV show was my childhood Dreadnought.
Gotta love that Starsector friendly pirate market ost in video.
One thing I always found interesting about the Dreadnoughts in Star Wars that isn't really brought up in the films is just how much of a logistical nightmare they were to keep operational even for the Empire. In the current canon post Endor there were plenty of cases of them having to be abandoned due to the the breakdown of supply lined as the Empire stopped working as a cohesive body and the Imperial Warlords in the older expanded universe had similar issues where sometimes they would possess one or more larger Dreadnought class ships but completely lacked the manpower to fully crew them.
Note with Babylon 5. They have cruisers as the smaller faster ship class and the Destroyer as the bigger heavier war ships. I like that as it fits with the names rather than the current system where the cruisers are just smaller and faster battleships and destroyers are just built up torpedo boat destroyers.
In Neal Asher's Agent Cormac series, Dreadnoughts are scary ships because they're absolutely massive
Mass Effect has come to define what I think of when I hear the term Dreadnought. I love the way navies are setup in that world, at least the relatively shallow look we get at them through the games and lore.
That was more interesting than I'd expected. Thank you.
Music choices always great !🤩🤩🤩
In my work, I've always treated Dreadnoughts as overpriced super-prototypes, IE, they're pound for pound better than any other ship out there, but they cost multiple times as much, to the degree that you could buy several weaker ships for the same price, enough to actually overwhelm one dreadnought. So it's a statement of financial power as much as anything else. In addition, what goes into a dreadnought previews the next generation of ships of the line. Some readers have very strong feelings about that.
The Super Star Destroyer from SW isn't really a 'dreadnought' it's what would be called a JUGGERNAUT!
In a hard sci-fi series that I'm writing, the main factions both have dreadnoughts, but they are dramatically different depending on their faction's tactics. The Jovian Federation has a pair of dreadnoughts which carry massive spinal-mount coilguns firing at relativistic velocities. At normal combat ranges, the rounds will score a hit before the enemy can do much of anything to respond. Ceres has one dreadnought, which has relatively normal armament but takes advantage of the square-cube law to have actual armor, a rarity in this setting. The UN has three "dreadnoughts" which act as a torch missile carriers. ("torch missile" refers to a missile powered by the same fusion engines as a spacecraft, rather than a chemical rocket. They have significantly increased range from conventional missiles, but are hideously expensive to use). All these ships are only about 300-500 meters in length, and operate as flagships for their strike groups.
That last clip of dreadnought hit hard
being self propelled (slow) and armed with big guns, and a person saying it should fear nothing, would that make the death star 1 a Dreadnought....
In speak of games worth of mention is Archangel Class Dreadnaught used in time of our rampage against Beast. 100 years later Karan S'Jet got in her fleet Dreadnougt left by Progenitors with its fancy Phase Array Beam weapon. To more context, Im speaking about Homeworld Universe.
You use footage from the game Dreadnought, but I think the Dreadnoughts there fit the role of a dreadnought as described. Their primary and secondary weapons were geared to killing other capital ships. And the highest DPS weapon in the game (Without stacking modules) was found on the Monarch, the most dreadnought-like ship in the game. Also, it's the only game I've seen with Artillery cruisers, which is something I always thought made sense, but no one seems to make them. They're essentially a giant gun with just enough ship built around them to get around. Dreadnought was a super underrated game imho
The way I look at it is Dreadnaughts are the 2nd largest Class of Warship...Ship Classes (from smallest to largest) in my Opinion are: Courier (Unarmed, but the smallest and fastest ships in space); Frigate/Customs Corvette; Destroyer; Light Cruiser; Heavy Cruiser; Battlecruiser; Battleship, Dreadnaught; Superdreadnaught... The smallest Capitol Ship is usually the Battlecruiser or Battleship... Different ship types (Missile, Fighter Carrier etc.) can be designed to be almost any Class, it all depends on how big you build it so for example, you can have a Carrier Battlecruiser and a Carrier Superdreadnaught, the only difference being how big they are, how fast and maneuverable they are (smaller ships tending to be faster and more agile that larger ships) and how many Fighters (and what type) they carry...
There's another interesting take on the Dreadnought in the Helfort's War series (Graham Sharp Paul): in that dreadnoughts are smaller but more advanced than many other ships, being significantly tougher/more survivable than larger ships with comparable firepower, and having much smaller crews.
Homeworld: Cataclysm has a good dreadnought
3:17 Ah yes, that's right. Who can forget USS GIANT EVIL SHIP? I so HATE EVERYTHING Jar Jar Abrams has made!
Still hoping for the day that the Homeworld franchise makes it into these videos. The Dreadnought from Homeworld: Cataclysm is such a memorable shape, and there's something about using the special ability to unload every missile in its arsenal all in one burst that was always so satisfying.
"why sf does it?" the same reason as rl did it. the battleship in 1900 was 10K ton or so, while less than half a century later they grown to 40K or more. if a battleship from the early era stayed in service, it would find itself being dwarfed by their much bigger versions, and even found themselves overgrown by the larger and larger cruisers too. the bigger question is why they never get rid of the small ships. also the yamato was a somewhat of this trope, a one of (class of) ultra large ship that was never even tried after, as the battleships are gone. so it was not as out of place, just the name is a bit strange, as the dreadnought was on the smaller size for its time already.
Fun fact: HMS Dreadnough was NOT the first uniform main battery to be laid down. That honor actually goes to U.S.S. South Carolina. England saw the South Carolina and German Nassau being built and decided to "rush" out a ship of their own.
Thr Wing Commander franchise featured various "dreadnaught" ships. WC Prophecy definitely had them - both Kilrathi and the other bad guys.
For Babylon 5 I like to think that their classification of the Omega Class as a destroyer compared to the Nova Class Dreadnought is that they are re-scaling their fleet naming conventions against their expected survivability against Minbari ships (and to a lesser extent Centauri). It is why the Warlock is still classified as a destroyer despite being a big jump from the Omega class firepower wise with its twin GOD cannons.
I always saw "dreadnought" as a classification of the current ne plus ultra of battleships. Granted, my gaming background is from the RPG Traveller, where that was pretty much how it was applied. Beyond that, I think, for me, it's more of a slang for battleship much in the same way "battlewagon" is.