I wound up spending more time designing ships than I did playing the game.

The huge size of an aircraft carrier is dictated by how much deck space it takes to land a plane. That said, it does have a psychological punch.

I’ve seen SF carrier concepts that are large enough to land B-52s. Or SF carriers that can fly. Very impressive, not too useful.

In real life, navies are trying to figure out how to get the function of a carrier into a smaller space, using better catapults, “ski-jump” decks, and a lust for VTOVL planes.

As for flying carriers, the last attempts at that were the Akron and Macon airships that flew out of the big hangar I can see from here.

As for the weaponry, lasers and rail guns are space opera mainstays but you would think that smart missiles would be all that they would carry

The capital ship, the battleship (BB), the big gun platform designed primarily for defeating its own counterpart in fleet action, has proven too vulnerable and expensive. No navy today has any.

The cruiser(CA & CL) still remains in the order of battle, but is also diminishing in numbers for many of the same reasons.

The increasing lethality, accuracy and range of weapons and improved communications and coordination has made the destroyer (DD) the backbone of modern navies. Originally a specialized type designed primarily as a counter to torpedo boats (their original name was ‘torpedo boat destroyer’) has now become the workhorse of the fleet. Of course, they have become much larger and more capable, and are specializing for specific missions, such as antisubmarine warfare, anti-aircraft protection, pickets, scouts, patrol and escort work.

My own destroyer, built in 1959) was already the size of a WWII light cruiser, and it was soon downgraded from “Destroyer Leader, Guided Missile (DLG)” to “Destroyer, Guided Missile” (DDG) as larger and more powerful destroyers took over its role as all-purpose combatant and aircraft carrier escort. It was originally designated a “frigate”, although that term is now being reassigned be follow European naming conventions. Frigates are now small destroyers, what in WWII used to be called “Destroyer Escorts” (DE) in USN, and corvettes in NATO.

The three main classes, battleships, cruisers and destroyers, are what used to be called in the days of sail ships-of-the-line, frigates and corvettes.

And alas, as in science fiction space navies, ships no longer slug it out with guns within sight of each other. Engagements are now carried out over the horizon, and fleets (like an aircraft carrier battle group), are now spread out over an area of ocean the size of Texas.

Its not like the Old Navy.

The only Hollywood spaceship that ever actually succeeded in looking like I would expect a real alien spcecraft to look like (that is, totally disorienting and completely incomprehensible) was V’ger, in the first Star Trek movie. And no phony engine noises, just a dissonant and really eerie musical score.

Most races of the SF universe seem to be obsessed with making spaceships frigging enormous. I read Cordwainer Smith’s “Golden the Ship Was,” where the secret weapon was a tiny ship with a lethal biowarfare device and projectors that made it look like it was a thousand miles long.

But that was a fake ship. Is there really a point to making giant miles-long star destroyers, unless the size of the weaponry demands it? (If you have 16″ guns, it takes a battleship to haul them around.)

Otherwise, the same resources could make a fleet of smaller ships that would probably be more effective in an attack, and not be One Big Fat Target.

Another tradition is covering giant spaceships with constellations of windows. In movies and games this creates a subconscious scale in the mind as you think “city at night.) In real life, what the hell does a giant star destroyer need with tens of thousands of windows? Do Imperial Troopers get cranky if each one doesn’t have a room with a window?

You don’t even get much psychological effect from a giant warship in space. Movie space battles aside, where you see ships sliding past each other firing Hornblower broadsides, real space battles rarely present any target to the eye other than a possible dot of light even if you’re the size of the Death Star.