FS Short Hand
Ingame Terminology
Wing - A unit of fightercraft, varying in size from one to six ships. The normal number is four. Ships of a wing are labelled by their wing name and a number (i.e. Alpha 1, Alpha 2, and so on).
Cruiser - Smallest combatant capital craft classification. Cruisers are at least several times the size of a fighter or bomber and posess mainly antifighter weaponry, with one or two (or in the case of the SC Rakshasa, three) anti-capital weapons. The defensive fire of a cruiser is rarely capable of stopping a determined bomber wing, and most are vunerable to even a well-handled lone fighter. Unable to carry fighters. Canonical examples include the Fenris and the Leviathan.
Corvette - Middle ground combatant capital craft, falling between the cruiser and the destroyer in size and capablity. Equipped with between two and four anticapital weapons and considerably more impressive antifighter armament then a cruiser. Corvettes are capable of defending themselves adequately against a small number of enemy fighters or bombers. With the exception of the Moloch, corvettes are unable to carry fighters of their own. Canonically, these are rather rarer in the Freespace-verse then other ship classes, with the Deimos being the corvette with most game time.
Destroyer - Large combatant capital craft, combining the functions of destroying enemy ships and transporting fighters. Destroyers vary wildly in armament and effectiveness against different types of targets. They will have at least one heavy-calibur anticapital weapon and probably several more, plus a number of cruiser-corvette anticapital weapons. Destroyers tend to need fighter cover more then corvettes; some of them actually mount fewer antifighter weapons, and all have much larger amounts of surface area that needs to be defend. Most of the significent capital ships in Freespace canonically have been destroyers, from the GTD Galatea and GTD Bastion in the original Freespace and the GTD Aquitaine and GVD Psamtik in Freespace 2.
Superdestroyer - Bigger, meaner, and tougher then a destroyer, yet too small for the Juggernaut classification; first applied well before the Juggernaut classification came into exsistance. Only the Hades and Lucifer have canonically been given this classification.
Juggernaut - The pinnacle of combatant capital craft. A Juggernaut is capable of making mincemeat out of an enemy fleet singlehanded and is superbly equipped to combat other capital craft. Due to its large surface area its defenses against fightercraft attack are generally somewhat thinly spread, but a Juggernaut's sheer ability to absorb damage means that only another Juggernaut or a mass attack by corvettes and destroyers is capable of destroying one in anything like a timely manner. Only the Colossus and Sathanas have canonically been given this classification.
Carrier: Ship of any size whose primary purpose is to carry fightercraft, whether directly into combat or standing off and lending fightercraft support to ongoing operations as needed.
Frigate: Semi-canonical ship class, both the Hippocrates and the Iceni have been referred to as frigates; the normally accepted role of a frigate is that of a pocket destroyer, lacking a fighterbay and fighter support facilities/crews enabling the ship to be shrunk down to only slightly bigger than a corvette.
Dreadnought: Generally understood to be a destroyer-sized craft, but built for the sole purpose of ship-to-ship combat and lacking a fighterbay or supporting a very limited number of fighters purely for self-defense.
