I appreciate the writeup on the ship designs, especially the written descriptions which I can understand 
While many of the Navy’s officers have staunchly maintained their belief that the battlecruisers are the queen of battle, and that the new superdreadnoughts are too ungainly and slow to be effective on the strategic stage, it is hard to deny comparisons that show that the superdreadnoughts mount twice as many launchers, and have nearly twice as much passive defenses as the battlecruisers, for less than twice the cost. Regardless of the endless debates between the battlecruiser captains and the superdreadnought captains, the politicians love the huge SD’s and it is clear that the BC’s days as the queen of the fleet are numbered.
Based on the debacle where the Rehorish and D’Bringi out manoeuvred the humans inside their own territory I'd say that the officers are correct, unless the enemy uses even faster ships.
The Grisha class was their answer, and numerous units were built before the Last War. Thirty-seven units of this class still exist, all in mothballs where they are likely to stay, being considered too small and limited for current fleet duties.
Can these be fitted with the long range sensors? I'd have thought that small hulls with high speed would be great for giving fleets wide ranging scouting ability, or used to keep watch on jump points or spread around inhabited systems.
Currently, the Colonial Union fields frigate and explorer class scouts with long range scanners. The explorer class scouts are fast enough to match anything in space and can either close on larger targets, or run from screening ships. The frigate scouts are armed and armored, and can defend themselves. This combo worked will for the Colonial Union in the last war, but they haven't yet realized that things have changed. The D'Bringi have gone big on corvette-carrier-scouts, which are as fast as the CU's explorer-scouts, and faster than its frigate scouts. Worse, the Alliance is working on F1 fighters, which will be faster than the CU explorer class scouts if loaded with a light weapons load. That will be a problem if the Alliance and the CU start a new conflict. The CU is rapidly deploying carriers, but its mainstay carrier is a destroyer-sized CVE design that is slower than the Alliance's CT(V)'s and myopic, as it is optimized to carry fighters and doesn't have long-range scanners.
The CU's various escort designs could be refitted to make them scouts, but they'd have to either downgrade the weapons mount to a smaller weapon, like a plasma gun, or lose their point defense, which makes them vulnerable to missiles. For now, the CU Navy prefers to keep the escorts in reserve, with the intent of reactivating them if things are going badly or a critical warp point's defenses need a boost.
Given the CU's focus on large ships, it is likely that bit by bit, the smaller ships like frigates, corvettes, and escorts, are going to be phased out over time in favor of destroyers and light cruisers.
Kurt
