What Makes A Destroyer A Destroyer? 

"You're not going to see an anti-missile or screening destroyer." *stares in Arleigh Burke class AEGIS Destroyer*

One thing to remember, and you touched on the subject, a destroyer is a multipurpose vessel, it is a jack of all trades, and a master of none. (Unless specifically designed to be a certain type.)

One thing to remember, think of destroyers almost like the rifleman of the fleet. they are versatile, dependable, and need to be plentiful enough so that they can effectively complete their objectives. Depending on your weapons system that you use whether it be vanilla or something like the assault weapons pack, understanding, the loadout of a destroyer is important. Capital size weapons that make sense aboard a destroyer need be layed out well. For the Example at hand, I’ll use the (Yet Unpublished) “Doveka” Class Destroyer. Its armament consists of 5 dorsal twin barreled 400mm gun turrets, three ventral twin barrel 400 mm gun turrets, and two twin barrel 400 mm gun turrets to both port and starboard. All weapons on board are staggered so that all forward facing weapons can fire forward in direct action. All of this is complemented by the quad 1000mm spinal gun battery. Secondary armaments include 8 43mm rotary auto cannon turrets, 6 220mm burst fire rocket turrets, and a set of 4 80mm flak guns. The armament of the vessel is primarily dedicated to taking out enemy ships, laying down heavy firepower, while still having some capability to defend itself against and other perceived threats. Much like you touched on in the video, it’s length is only 62 blocks in length however, it is a bit taller than most of its contemporaries. The reason behind this is to incorporate more internal space for damage control systems, and crew accessibility. Depending on the design, a destroyer can be either very well-made or very poorly made. You either have a very well made destroyer, or a very poorly madelight cruiser, heavy frigate, or some other assault vessel. All of the ships here are great examples of a destroyer in their own respective lore, and everyone here has done a great job of capturing the feeling of what a destroyer should do. They need to be built in such a way that whatever faction is utilizing them, has a dependable, cheap, easily relied upon, capable vessel that can punch hard, take a task and complete it.

I'm so glad you pointed out that destroyers are not just glass cannons and can be brawlers as well. I've never liked how some make the claim that they're just glass cannons. I also like that you got into subclasses of destroyers with flanking destroyers and such. Speaking of subclass I would mention Escort Destroyers and Destroyer Escorts and yes there really is a difference between them. However there is no need to mention them because their roles could be fulfilled by frigates.

The blue destroyer is the Perseus class destroyer. But in Space Engineers, one person's destroyer is another person's battleship. The Outlands series (which you mentioned) uses a block count system to determine different classes of ships. For example, the destroyer class can be a minimum of 2,601 and 3,000 blocks and take 1 "turn" to build.

I have 2 types of destroyers that get deployed, Fleet and Esscort. The fleet destroyer is a vessel designed to engage enemy capital ships, the Esscort is built to screen or defend a space often with lots of turrets but minimal centrals.

My inderstanding was that destroyers were created as a response to patrol boats and subs. They are meant to be hunter killers. They are fast for their size, carry a wide range of sensors and a lot of weapon options. They generaly rely on depth charges and torpedos and have a cannon that can aim fast enough to hit smaller and faster targets. Their job is to protect a fleet from things that are either to stealthy for other ships to see or to fast for a battleships large guns to keep up with. Technicly your not wrong that a destroyer is built to destroy ther ships. The catch is that they are designed to destroy specific types of ships and usualy in defense of much larger ships.

wow! how have i not found your channel yet?? this was an excellent presentation! you're critical like luka the guide without being an asshole. you present more of a perspective and opinion than Aaron from LSG your information is general enough to be applicable to vanilla or modded. and the best part is, you pull from many different sources! i LOVED seeing you take such a variety of ships from different makers and contrast them (and you did so with grace)

This actually would be simple. Destroyer is a dedicated warfleet escort. As such it need to be capable to catch up to them and face threats a warfleet would take. So a capital ships. That is also source of glass cannon myth. Destroyers by design punch above the weight in environment where they are expected to fight. But they are actually absolute monsters in own actual size category. But of course not everything is for free, as Destroyers tend to lack many facilities. Interesting sub-category of Destroyer is a Fleet Destroyer. Those are bit larger Destroyers, what are actually expected to perform scouting duty, checking way taken by the fleet. Those tend to be bit larger (paralel to Light Cruiser). But otherwise they serve the same role as smaller Destroyer. Trope wise, this type is where you also would expect massive spinal gun. As they may try ambush enemy ships, before arrival of the heavy hitters. In context of the game those are pure combatants! Designed to take and deal hits, to be as compact and maneuverable as possible. Destroyers tend to not have any facilitates (except decent jump drive) and may have almost no crew space, as they rely on support of the larger ships. But generally if you see not too large ship build to kill. That is a Destroyer! Also I decided to mention convoluted history of this class: Everything begin with invention of Torpedo and rising threat of Torpedo Boats. Quite fast threat was countered with use of older class of Gunboats, also armed with Torpedoes (Torpedo Gunboats). But they have major flaw! As boats they were limited to a coastline. Problem was solenoid by Spanish who designed large Torpedo Gunboat called Destructor. It give beginning of this ship type. But with introduction of aerial and submarine threats, (Torpedo) Destroyers grow even larger. This cause problem to the British who need smaller ships for different task. So Corvette was actually a derivative, as small specialized warship (Frigate come from that later, thorough US initially defined Frigate as larger then Destroyer, but that later changed). Anyway (Escort) Destroyers grow and at one point they were large enough to take duty of Fleet Leader, what were Light Cruisers performing scouting duty. The End.

I love the deep dives into the logic and use of ship classes. This all makes me feel like I'm playing a different game. Where do i need to go to participate in these epic ship battles where this information is inspired from?

I just watched all three of these videos and I aboslutly love them, they are really helpful and you do a really good job with making these easily understandable

what is the name of that 5th Destroyer?

can you please link the items from video in description so that we can subs to them?

What do you mean by Ion engines ? Reactors ? Small one or big ones ?

. . . "bit my cheek" 😂