Heavy Cruisers and Light Cruisers

Long Beach-class Heavy Cruisers: 19 in service

The newest heavy cruisers to be launched, the Long Beach and her sisters will be the first non-capital ships built with the new second-generation gravity drives. This will allow easier transit into hyperspace, faster acceleration, better shielding, and better maneuverability. She will also be well armed, mounting 6 Lance Torpedo tubes, 2 Grav Lasers, 16 fusion cannons, and 30 particle phalanxes. Also she will mount the most up-to-date sensor system designed. The Long Beach is the smallest vessel to date that carries a gravity drive. These ships are designed for a wide variety of roles including escort, assault, scouting, and blockade running. Therefore she is designed with modular sections that can be switched at a spacedock to customize her to the needed role. She also has an auxiliary ion drive for stealth maneuvers. Originally built as a class of 24, but several vessels were lost in the recent war.

Akagi-class Heavy Cruisers: 16 in service

These were built shortly after the Nicodemus class was, and therefore they are starting to see the end of their useful days. Several of them have had their forward Chemlasers and both Grav Lasers removed in favor of eight more torpedoes so that they can operate as fire support vessels.

Barbarian-class Heavy Cruisers: 2 in service (sort of)

The Barbarian class of Heavy Cruisers was built for Earth Fleet in the 2160's for service against the Drakat.  Quite successful ships in their day, they were decommissioned shortly after the Second Civil War, when the economic downturn forced the cancellation of a modernization scheme which would have seen their heavy Plasma Cannons replaced with Grav Lasers, as well as other improvements.  Two were saved to be preserved as museum ships, but they were refitted with weaponry fifteen years later for use as part of Task Force David against the Christian Federation during the Third Civil War.

Prince of Wales-class Light Cruisers: 42 in service

A fairly new Light Cruiser design incorporating several new technologies. Too small to justify a gravity drive, she is the smallest ship to carry a gravity laser, although it only carries one. Like the Long Beach they are modular and can be outfitted for various roles, by swapping out the turrets for different mixes of fusion cannons and chemlasers, although the gravity laser cannot be removed

Niteroi-class Light Cruisers: 24 in service

The Niteroi class of ships were built just before the Prince Of Wales class. They are slightly larger, but non-modular. They carry no Fusion Cannons but make up for it by carrying two particle beam cannons, a weapons system normally mounted only on much larger ships. They carry fewer weapons mounts than other cruisers, but each mount is more powerful than normal for a ship of it's size.

Camelot-class Light Cruisers: 1 in service (sort of)

The Camelot class of light cruisers were built in the mid-2100's as warships for Earth Fleet in its battle with the Bugs.  In those days, technomagickal Reverse-Entropy Heat Sinks were not yet available, so these ships were some of the last built with an aft ring of heat radiators to keep the ship cool in the vacuum of space.  Unusually for a cruiser, instead of full Lance Torpedo tubes capable of sustained fire, this class had a large number of box launchers for its torpedoes, trading sustained fire capability for one massive opening salvo in an attempt to overwhelm enemy point defense systems.  Also unusually, it carried no starfighter complement, just shuttles.  Criticized at the time for thus being underarmed for their size and cost, only six were built.

Although the last of these ships was decommissioned shortly before the Third Civil War, one of them, the EFS Bodium, was saved from the scrapyard and sent to Cronos to be preserved as a museum ship.  In 2244, it was refitted with weaponry, renamed the NIS Samarian, and sent into battle with a crew of Jewish mercenaries to fight the Christian Federation as part of Task Force David.