DDE

2030... 2030... * continues praying in Russian *

Wait. Missed that one. ABSOLUTELY NOT. On the contrary, anti-ship nuclear tests have shown that only slightly dispersing your ships limits nuclear weapon damage, especially nuclear torpedo damage, to a single ship. https://www.quora.com/Why-are-not-all-anti-ship-missiles-tipped-with-nuclear-warheads/answer/Alec-Zander Looks terrifying, right? Except all prompt casualties were ships within 1150 yards. Everything else was broadly salvageable or repairable had it been equipped with CBRN sprinklers (technically the CounterMeasure WashDown System, CMWDS) - the vapourized radioactive seawater permeates steel and makes the whole ship lethally "hot". And that's an UNDERWATER blast.

On the contrary. Your versatile battlestars would be exponentially more expensive than any specialist ship. You’d be lucky if you could afford one for the price of those fifteen. No, because the various carrier-battleships never made it off the drawing board to begin with. The flight deck required for fixed-wing aircraft both a) imposes a minimum size requirement and b) prevents the ship from having pretty much anything else on its deck - can’t mount battleship turrets in sponsons, and those launch tubes on the Kuznetsov really cut into her hangar capacity. This sort of fiction was abandoned in the 1930s and was never returned to.

It's almost as if history hasn't shown the folly of singular (or low-quantity) super-duper warmachines...

Facepalm. One nuke gets through and a ship is gone. ANY ship. You don't want to put all of your eggs in one basket, because the sword is always more potent than the shield. Heck, the USN is currently moving towards "distributed lethality", where even the tankers carry cruise missiles, just because the carriers are a huge, fragile target. And that's before we talk displacement and the sacrifices needed to combine mutually exclusive design elements in one platform. Double facepalm. You do realize that the all-in-one capability would result in obscene under-armour volume, which in turn would require a ludicrous amount of material to protect, right? Later battleship only protected a minor part of the ship with any meaningful armour. This is the critical part of an aircraft carrier. Just you try and armour it up:

Show me the Nimitz’s anti-submarine, anti-ship and long-range anti-aircraft assets, outside of an air wing that can easily get shot down and takes hours to sortie out? Why do you think the Ticos, the Arleigh Burkes and the Los Angeles all exist and are all used as escorts?

Have you ever seen a Nimitz-class go anywhere without a ginormous escort? Aircraft carriers desperately need surface combatant support. Heck, they may have been obsolete for two-three decades, and Gorshkov will get the last laugh.

Except for it being a soft sci-fi verse. Which means a crew without automation is MORE capable for the sake of the plot.

Not much. Just airgap the heck out of it. And spacecraft hulls are good electromagnetic containers. It's the heat radiators you need to worry... to worry so much, stealth in space won't exist. Which has to retract its landing bays almost whenever it's exposed to enemy fire. Not to mention, it's an all-in-one ship, which is boring.

Shhhhhhh, space opera sci-fi fa... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AxvxP18BhU SHUT UP!

For any practical combat spacecraft? At least. Plus, that's why I keep saying "tiny pressurized repair hangar".

...which is consistent with the WWII scheme. A deck park, full of plywood aircraft with heavy ordnance and full of avgas, under enemy fire, is an absolute disaster.

You're on your own, kid. SW-style means as much magic (poorly disguised as technology) as you wish; the more like WWII carriers in space, the better.

@Jhorriga The reasons aircraft carriers look like they look like are: gravity and water, which prevent them from having a cylindrical deck water and the elements, which require an enclosed deck, although the US often uses deck parks as well most aircraft being unable to land at zero relative velocity, requiring a landing strip and sophisticated capture mechanisms the large downwash area of aircraft with high mass-flow, low exhaust velocity engines In space, none of this is really relevant. Look how VTOL reshapes the use of the flight deck:

@ARS, it is however, EXTREMELY important to point out that a Battlestar is extremely hampered by any internal hangars. A space "surface combatant", especially if the setting uses armour, needs to be a lean, mean fighting machine without an extra cubic centimeter having to be covered by armour plating. @Jhorriga, there aren't that many reasons why you'd want to have a spacecraft in a shirt-sleeve environment - and quite a few why you wouldn't. For example, because your maneuvering thrusters are likely to be covered in unburnt residue of their toxic, mutagenic, carcinogenic, corrosive fuel...

*homicidal rage* For a spacecraft that's already performed rendezvous and approach it's trivial to perform a KSP-style docking or be berthed in by a robot arm. I'd suggest straight-out avoiding naval carrier analogies, have a tiny maintenance hangar, and keep all of the craft externally docked with little to no armour protection. At most, a semi-enclosed, non-pressurized takeoff and landing deck. Otherwise, the Space Police is going to come for you and CONCORDokken your ass.

OK, I need a link to throw at the anti-nuke people.

What's wrong with a reactor swiftly disappearing at the bottom of the Indian Ocean?

Assuming it's Zuma who's emitting them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar Or it's equipped with a nuclear rector and the classified status is just to avoid the PR debacle.

Ayy lmao quantum vacuum!

I still want to watch Solo burn. After TWO sizeable reshoots, it’s gonna be good!

Moreover, if we take a look at Roscosmos, everything post-third stage is considered to be the fault of the tug (and its manufacturers) and not the launcher, even though by all accounts it's just a fourth stage.

If you're then going to declare it lost, creating a louder kerfuffle in advance about it makes sense. Plus it's one of three sats, ever, that have been launched with this degree of secrecy.

Electric propulsion, maybe. Strategic-class laser weapons? Nope. It's the small Counter-(Drone) Rocket Artillery Mortar category that's blooming thanks to solid-state lasers, but the megawatt-class death rays are stagnant. I don't know if it's a typo, but we're getting there...

I doubt it. Only a third of the main vehicle was the FGB, all indicators point to it being of comparable size to the operational Skif and Kaskad batteries.