Ahoy there!
So, I’ve got to warn you all ahead of time, this post is going to be a bit more of a rant and somewhat more negative than the usual fare around here!
Today I’m going to talk a bit about a pet peeve I have when it comes to space naval games in particular but also science fiction settings in general; the inclusion of Dreadnoughts. You see this crop up fairly frequently; Star Trek has it’s 3-nacelled variants of various star ships, Star Wars has the Super Star Destroyers, and so on. All of these “uber ships” are then tagged with the term dreadnought. In various naval games, often dreadnought-class ships essentially just enlarged battleships; this was the approach taken by Firestorm Armada, for example.
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Most military science fiction is set in a future version of our universe. The word dreadnought is well established in our naval culture. You may argue that it is an English word derived from English naval history I doubt if any naval officer in the world would not recognize it. And of course English is rapidly becoming the global language.
You are right that the word is sometimes used carelessly for bigger battleship, but this is often found in the science fiction the games are based on. So don’t complain about its use in wargames that are just being faithful to the source material.
The proper use of the word would be for a ship based on some revolutionary technology that makes other ships obsolete.
By the way, the term “all big gun” is a bit misleading. Even the original Dreadnought had some secondary armament. The real breakthrough was making all main armament the same size to improve fire control.