Lore Question, How long have capital ships been around?

CMDRjacebenin · Oct 22, 2019

I've been working on some fan fiction in my spare time and wanted to be sure I got this at least vaguely right (a huge improvement over not finding anything and getting it completely wrong). I've not found anything on when capital ships were first being produced (searched these forums, Google, Elite Dangerous wiki, etc) and figured I'd do a post for it. The closest I've come is to 3270-80's-ish and this is my own pick as Elite Dangerous wiki points out the first FSD wasn't introduced by the Sirius Corporation until 3297 and I'm not even sure if that's correct either but it's all I've got right now. I'd rather what I'm working on fit into the overall story than be my arbitrary choice as that's part of the whole pull for Elite Dangerous for me, getting to create stories within Frontier's universe. I know that they didn't introduce capital ships in-game until a year or two after the release of the game (probably off a bit, I didn't follow it as extensively as I'm trying to do so now) but I'm not sure if that's because they started producing them then in the lore or if that's just when Frontier decided to release them? Thank you for your help!

Hanerib · Oct 23, 2019

Probably since Achenar wars, that's when arms race began and focus shifted to dedicated combat ships. Though Fed ships still look like they were designed for support roles for planetary warfare. Early FSD was heavy and probably closer to what capital ships these days use. There have been some setbacks in history of hyperspace probably due to changes in availability of alien technology.

CMDRjacebenin · Oct 23, 2019

Thank you Hanerib! This was really helpful and I won't even have to change much of what I've already got written.

Ian Doncaster · Oct 24, 2019

CMDRjacebenin said:
I know that they didn't introduce capital ships in-game until a year or two after the release of the game

The military capital ships - Farragut and Interdictor - were in the 1.0 release.

The large civilian megaships weren't introduced in game until 2.3 but had been strongly hinted at as being around before then.

FE2 - set a century earlier - had two large freight ships which would be classed as megaships nowadays: the Lynx Bulk Carrier (basically two Panthers stuck together with some auxilliary cargo pods) and the Long Range Cruiser (a proper megaship-scale ship several km long)

Deep Space Dredgers haven't appeared much in any game but were canonical in the original Elite.

Generation Ships made their first in-game appearance in 2.3, but were likewise canonical in the original Elite as having been around a long time then.

CMDRjacebenin · Oct 24, 2019

lol I wasn't following it enough to even know that the Farragut and Interdictor were in the 1.0

Thank you Ian for clearing that up and all the extra information!

Vasious · Oct 27, 2019

Ian Doncaster said:
Deep Space Dredgers haven't appeared much in any game but were canonical in the original Elite.

They appeared in a Beta

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBTDmXmgdjM

For the contemporary Capital ships, for as the above said, Classes of Capital ships and Classes of mega ships have been around for hundreds of years,
The Interdictors appeared in the Novel Elite: Legacy, where the Empire is selling them to a aligned faction so suggests they have been around a while for them to be selling them.

Sapyx · Oct 28, 2019

We never saw them in-game, but military warships were canonical in the lore of previous games. The generic term "Cruiser" was usually used. They'd have been bigger than player ships like the Cobra and Anaconda, butprobably smaller than a Farragut or Majestic.

According to lore, the Federation and Empire also have several other different classes of capital ships at their disposal, besides the one each that we see in-game. Some NPC pilots with Federal Navy backgrounds list on their CVs serving on an "O'Brien Class Battlecruiser", which seems to be a different thing to either the Farragut class battlecruiser, or the FNS O'Brien, which is of course a Farragut class.

So, lorewise at least, both the Federation and Empire have other capital ships in their fleet - probably ships for diferent roles, like carriers, dreadnoughts, troop transports, that sort of thing. We just don't see them.

As for "how long have the current models been around", we can only guess. It is speculated that capital ships still use the old-fashioned hyperdrives, so the current designs would predate the invention of the FSD.

drew · Nov 6, 2019

Sapyx said:
According to lore, the Federation and Empire also have several other different classes of capital ships at their disposal, besides the one each that we see in-game. Some NPC pilots with Federal Navy backgrounds list on their CVs serving on an "O'Brien Class Battlecruiser", which seems to be a different thing to either the Farragut class battlecruiser, or the FNS O'Brien, which is of course a Farragut class.

I can clear this one up.

In the original lore guides the Federal Capital ships were designated as the O'Brien class. Before ED was launched they had been changed to Farragut class. It appears that not everyone typing text into the game got that memo.

I guess, canonically, we can say that the Farragut class is a refinement of an earlier, but very similar, O'Brien class.

Cheers,

Drew.