From the Begining New Chapter Added (9/12/06)

[Hunpecked]

I'm still reading and enjoying the story, too. Comments:

It seems a bit late in the war for the first meeting of the Joint Chiefs and the War Cabinet. No doubt Icaran communication technology supports virtual meetings, so perhaps this is just the first face-to-face conference.

With regard to warship terminology, note that even the lowly escort (in stock SE IV) at 150 kT is larger than any terrestrial warship and can wipe out an undefended planetary population single-handed. The natural tendency would be to call the first such spacecraft "space battleships" or "dreadnoughts", but then what would you call subsequent classes that are several times bigger and more powerful? This problem is illustrated by the "Majestic" class of "battleships" (1895, 16,000 tons, 4x12" guns) which was surpassed only a decade later by the "Invincible" "battlecruiser" class (1908, 17,500 tons, 8x12" guns).

It might be better to drop wet navy terminology entirely and go with something more generic, like "Type 300 hull", or maybe "Intimidator class warship".

This approach also avoids terminology problems when SE IV's generic hulls are used for "non-standard" purposes, e.g. a battlecruiser minesweeper ("battlesweeper"?), cruiser-class colony ship ("colonuiser"?), or frigate transport ("frigport"?).

[kerensky]

On the point of ship sizes, I think it would be easier jsut to name the just the class of teh ship (eg Intimidator) and tehn refer to teh type of ship (eg battlecruiser) for size comparisons. This would also avoid the non-standard use of hull types. For example, the Mayflower class carrier is based on a monitor sized hull.

If you think of each ships classification as a size range for the ship to fit in, it should make things easier. For example, ships up to 150kt would be refered to as escorts, ships from 150kt to 200kt would be frigates, etc.

[Starhawk]

Well as far as the first meeting, no it's not but remember Grand Admiral Hallice retired not all that long before and the new Grand Admiral has been busy trying to pull the peices of the military together so no real time for face-to-face conferences with the other members of the military council.

And on to the ship classifications well I've been referring to the ships by size since the start of my story so it would seem a little inconsistent to suddenly drop all terms for my ships like the Yu Hing Pe "Super Dreadnought"

As far as comparing sizes for the non-conventional roles I do think I'll just leave that up to a general size comparison as you suggested for example just a "Large minesweeper" or in the case of Federal Security ships just a general "Medium and Large Peacekeeping ship" would work.

And as far as stating the actual size and tonnage of a ship I don't really see a problem with that so I'd like to stick to that And I do have a clever little idea about that waiting just see

[Rasorow]

So this story is dead?

Rasorow